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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 







Walter Savage Landor 



A CRITICAL STUDY 



EDWARD WATERMAN EVANS, JR. 

UNIVERSITY FELLOW, PRINCETON 



MAR 19 i£ 






G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK LONDON J-' 

27 West Twenty-third St. 24 Bedford St., Strand 

1892 

k*9 



TR 






s 



COPYRIGHT, 1892 
BY 

EDWARD WATERMAN EVANS, JR. 



Printed and Bound by 

Ube IRnicfcerbocfeer iPress, IRevv Ilorfe 

G. P. Putnam's Sons 



TO 

JAMES ORMSBEE MURRAY, LL.D. 

EXEMPLAR 

OF THE PERSUASIVENESS AND DIGNITY OF CULTURE 

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED 



CONTENTS. 



Preface vii 

Landor as a Man of Letters . i 
Landor's Poetry . . . .61 
Landor's Prose Writings . .119 
Landor's Place in Literature . 181 
Appendix 189 



PREFACE. 



ONLY those books endure as living 
presences, and not as mere mortuary- 
tablets, wherein there is a vital coa- 
lescence of sense and thought, of na- 
ture and spirit. Other volumes may 
possess a relative longevity, as links 
in a historical development, or as 
affording suggestive material which 
shall subsequently be transmuted 
into artistic form ; but their mortality 
is inevitable. Scientific knowledge, 
with its classification of phenomena 
and its discovery of their necessary 
co-existences and sequences in time 
and space, is ever expanding. Hence 
the latest book in science is usually 
the best. It has assimilated, and re- 

vii 



M 



viil Preface. 

produced in fuller growth, all pre- 
vious works pertaining to its depart- 
ment. Ideas, on the other hand, 
that are formed in the crucible of 
art — ideas that suffuse the appear- 
ances of nature with the free soul of 
man — have an absolute value. And 
the book embodying them is a spir- 
itual organism, whose end is focused 
in itself, in its own delightful, imagi- 
native marriage of idea and expres- 
sion. The work of art grows not. It 
is a " wavering apparition " fixed " in 
its place with thoughts that stand 
forever." 

Now the productions of Walter 
Savage Landor are eminently artis- 
tic. Hence, as those who admire 
him keep noting with approval the 
recent reprints of his several works, 
and the eulogistic references at pres- 
ent so often made to this master of 
English ; they cannot withhold their 
belief in his much-doubted predic- 



Preface. ix 

tion, that he, as an author, would 
dine late surrounded by a choice 
company of kindred spirits — they 
cannot withhold their belief that 
he belongs among the immortals. 
Though his lettered contemporaries 
from Southey to Swinburne were 
almost unanimous in acknowledging 
the distinction and charm of Lan- 
dor's writings, his audience, at least 
until recently, has been by no means 
proportionate to his commanding 
worth as a literary artist. 

While there have appeared two 
biographies of Landor, a cumber- 
some one by John Forster, his liter- 
ary executor, and a judicious one 
by Mr. Colvin in the English Men 
of Letters series, no critique, at once 
adequately exclusive and inclusive, 
has been written in the effort to 
determine Landor's place and func- 
tion in literature. Unlike a biog- 
raphy, such a critique would have 



x Preface. 

to be exclusive, passing over all de- 
tails of outward history not insep- 
arably linked with the author's 
inner life and writings ; and it would 
have to be inclusive, tracing with 
more coherence than could well be 
done in a biography the relation of 
the author's works to his age and to 
his personality, and then bringing 
the canons of criticism to bear con- 
cretely upon his several contribu- 
tions in poetry or prose. This has 
been the method pursued, however 
tentatively, in the following critical 
study. 

In treating of Landor's attitude 
toward the scientific, philosophical, 
and religious conceptions of the 
period, as also toward criticism and 
politics, it was found hard to charac- 
terize him other than negatively. 
His positive qualities, however, hav- 
ing thus been provided with a nega- 
tive background, can, it is hoped, be 



Preface. xi 

thereupon brought out in clearer 
relief. 

Though the immediate purpose in 
writing this critique, and also the 
Landorian idyl contained in the Ap- 
pendix, was to compete for college 
prizes, — one in criticism, the other 
in poetry, — the aspirations of the 
writer continued to go out toward a 
wider audience. And though the 
actual composition was undertaken 
and completed amidst the press and 
distraction of undergraduate duties, 
these essays are the record of a 
previous study of Landor's works, 
at once careful, prolonged, and 
enthusiastic. 

Princeton College, 

January 13, 1892. 



I. 

LANDOR AS A MAN OF LETTERS 



I. 

LANDOR AS A MAN OF LETTERS. 

A UNIVERSAL library has three 
alcoves. The first contains the reli- 
gious books, those which relate man 
to Deity. The deepest question in 
the human soul is the why of its ex- 
istence ; and the only answer to this 
riddle of the sphinx is God. More- 
over, while the clear-minded Greek 
may conceive of Divinity as pure 
intelligence unperturbed by emotion, 
a passionless force in itself unmoral, 
because in it duty and inclination 
are one ; while the vehement Hebrew 
may picture Jehovah as frowning in 
righteous anger at the sins of his 
people, — both Oriental and Occi- 
3 



4 Walter Savage Landor. 

dental alike must ever be feeling after 
the guardian hand of God : and those 
seers, who have caught a glimpse of 
his trailing garments, are always to 
be regarded as the rarest benefactors 
of mankind. Nor dare we suppose 
that the Deity has revealed himself 
once for all far back in the immuta- 
ble past, that long since the book 
of God's plan has been sealed. In 
these modern times, Fichte and 
Schelling, Carlyle and Emerson, 
Wordsworth and Browning, these 
and many more have sought to un- 
cover the secret things of God. The 
second alcove is stored with those 
books which unite the mind of man 
with outward nature. Our ideal of 
the good is only satisfied by resting 
in the perfection of the Godhead ; 
in the same way a type of the true 
and fair is, upon occasion, best un- 
veiled beneath the shows of nature ; 
and the Infinite Reason that gleams 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 5 

from moonlit waters, or looks down 
upon us from the silent stars, has 
power to rouse our deepest, most 
impersonal emotions, to soothe our 
world-weariness, and to attune our 
souls to the Soul whose manifestation 
is nature. The third alcove is laden 
with the humanistic books, the vol- 
umes which give the biography of 
man, his outer and his inner expe- 
rience. 

It would be hard to find more uni- 
versal categories by which to deter- 
mine the genus of an author than 
these. And as criticism too often 
confines itself to details and tech- 
nique, thus failing to give an ade- 
quate conception even of these, 
because of its circumscribed point of 
view, it is well to recognize at the 
beginning the limitations of our 
author, and frankly to acknowledge 
that Walter Savage Landor saw but 
rarely the under and spiritual side of 



tX 



6 Walter Savage Landor. 

nature, and that at no time could 
he be called a man of God, having 
no final word of the Lord to utter. 
And while these three classes of 
books are not always mutually ex- 
clusive, but resemble water circles, 
each of which ripples into the other, 
yet, like such circles, each class re- 
tains a measure of its own identity. 
Thus, though Wordsworth was men- 
tioned as an interpreter of " the 
ways of God to men," he stands pre- 
eminently as the poet of nature. 
Precisely so is Landor, above all, 
"the humanist. Masculine strength 
and maidenly tenderness, all the 
variations of noble and attractive 
character, excited in him deep inter- 
est ; and his interest was gauged 
by his insight. Landor's very defi- 
ciency as an abstract thinker, his 
inability to forge a chain of dialectic, 
left his imagination the more un- 
dimmed, and on the alert to conjure 



Landor as a Man of Letters, 7 

up the phantoms of history and 
make them live again. And in his 
literary work, therefore, ideas con- 
nected with nature or God are mere 
scenic effects, so to speak, having no 
absorbing worth in themselves, while 
Landor's claim to an artistic repre- 
sentation of life is restricted to the 
reflective exhibition of certain types 
of character. 

Contrary to the habit of the hu- 
manists, who portray the manners 
and intellectual and moral culture 
distinctive of their day, Landor was 
in no respect an embodiment of the 
spirit of his time. Can we imagine 
what would have been the develop- 
ment of Oliver Goldsmith's genius 
apart from its eighteenth-century 
environment? At mention of the 
Vicar of Wakefield, or She Stoops 
to Conquer, the prudery and affec- 
tation of the women, the animality 
of the men, even the exaggerated 



8 Walter Savage Landor. 

style of dressing, — all the details of 
" our age of prose and reason," do 
they not come to mind at once ? But 
Shakspeare, who penetrated the per- 
sonality of Caesar or Brutus, of Lear 
or Macbeth, as profoundly as he did 
that of a contemporary, who so un- 
derstood the controlling forces of 
human nature, as that their manifes- 
tation in any particular age and 
person became an open secret to him 
— even Shakspeare is far more the 
mere Elizabethan writer than is Lan- 
dor the mere Victorian. Recent 
peculiar phases of English life were 
much better known to Dickens or 
Anthony Trollope than to Landor. 
The power of the latter consists, not 
in his grasp upon the transient as- 
pects of character, those aspects 
which a shifting environment will 
transform, but upon the simpler and 
more ultimate passions of the human 
heart. Landor's work does not show 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 9 

the careful scientific scrutiny of local 
types that is manifest on almost 
every page of Thackeray or George 
Eliot. The intense psychologic anal- 
ysis of a George Eliot is beyond Lan- 
dor's range. His psychology is more 
like that of Sophocles or Cicero. His 
representations are statuesque rather 
than pictorial. 

If Landor does not exhibit his men 
and women after the pattern of the 
times, neither does he array himself 
for or against what may be regarded 
as the tendencies of his age. About 
the great scientific movement — which 
has, however, only recently given 
us -its philosophic fruitage in the 
works of Herbert Spencer — Landor 
remained profoundly unconcerned. 
Neither Forster's Life nor any of 
Landor's writings gives us the im- 
pression that scientific questions 
possessed his attention in the least. 
And indeed, Forster, quoting from 



io Walter Savage Landor. 

Seymour Kirkup, says, that in con- 
versational encounters with Francis 
Hare, Landor avoided the sciences. 
And Landor himself, in his published 
letter to Emerson, correcting an ap- 
parent misconception, declares that 
he does not despise entomology, but 
is only ignorant of it ; as, indeed, he 
is of almost all science ; and while he 
loves flowers and plants, he knows 
less about them than is known by 
a beetle or butterfly. We do not of 
course fall into the anachronism of 
expecting Landor, who died in 1864, 
to be affected by the Darwinian the- 
ory, since the Origin of Species was 
not published till 1859 5 but we should 
have expected a man of his positive 
temper to have been stirred to indig- 
nant protest against the over-estima- 
tion of material comforts, of the 
mechanical improvements which sci- 
ence has given us, and the under-es- 
timation of the needs of the spirit. 



Landor as a Man of Letters, 1 1 

Perhaps Landor's somewhat isolated 
life in Italy and Bath hindered him 
from perceiving how the classicism 
which he so cherished was threatened 
by the incursion of Professor Huxley 
and the other dragoons of natural 
science and " the practical." It is not 
to Landor, but to Ruskin or Matthew 
Arnold, that we must go for a defence 
of the humanism which alone can 
satisfy " our sense for beauty " and 
"our sense for conduct." 

It is possible to inquire too curi- 
ously into psychical phenomena ; yet 
we venture the supposition that the 
sentiment of wonder, which awakens 
scientific aptitude, never existed in 
large measure in Landor's mental 
make-up. Wonder is the expression 
of a want, and is ever asking the why 
of things. It is the instinct for 
causes. Now, Landor's genius, as 
we hope to show more fully later, is 
essentially static, rather than dy- 



v/ 



1 2 Walter Savage Landor. 

namic. His style is not progressive 
and cumulative. He has slight 
ability for story-telling or for elabo- 
rate argument. Landor's power 
comes not from wonder, but from 
admiration, which rests upon a beauti- 
ful form, contented, and seeks no 
farther. We are not much surprised, 
therefore, when we find him taking 
no part in scientific discussion ; since 
his genius is predominantly aesthetic 
and imaginative. 

Nor can Landor be said to have 
assumed the attitude of partisan in 
the heated controversy between the 
empiricist and the intuitionalist, — a 
controversy which, avowed or un- 
avowed, comprehends so much of 
the higher literature of the century. 
Who has been more strident in his 
vociferations against " the philoso- 
phy of dirt," and who has more man- 
fully proclaimed Duty to be " the 
stern daughter of the voice of'God," 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 1 3 

than Thomas Carlyle ! Landor, on 
the other hand, in so far as he for- 
mulated his ideas, gravitated towards 
the utilitarian side. " This is phi- 
losophy, to make remote things tan- 
gible, common things extensively 
useful, useful things extensively com- 
mon, and to leave the least necessary 
for the last. . . . Truth is not 
reasonably the main and ultimate 
object of philosophy ; philosophy 
should seek truth merely as the means 
of acquiring and propagating happi- 
ness." In a letter to Southey, he 
says : " To increase the sum of 
happiness and to diminish the sum 
of misery, is the only right aim both 
of reason and of religion." Although 
Landor desired to walk with Epi- 
curus on the right hand, and Epic- 
tetus on the left, he practically made 
life's journey with only an indulgent 
Epicurus ; for he never was able, 
and indeed he never made much 



1 4 Walter Savage Landor. 

serious effort, to control the impulse 
of the moment. Landor's philo- 
sophic ideal, therefore, in the matter 
of conduct, does not run parallel with 
the modern one, as embodied in Kant 
or Fichte. Kant's ideal is duty done 
in the presence of inward hindrances, 
of opposing impulses ; Landor's ideal 
is characteristically Greek. Denying 
the need of conflict between man's 
lower and his higher nature, it insists 
upon the deep-rooted harmony of 
duty and desire, and practically yields 
the reins to inclination. Nowhere in 
literature is a refined type of Epicu- 
reanism more persuasively set forth 
than in the dialogue between Epi- 
curus, Leontion, and Ternissa. The 
Greek conception of the harmonious 
play of soul and body, of mental and 
material forces, is here seen in its 
irresistible charm. No restless striv- 
ing to impress a sense of our capa- 
bilities upon others, no amount of 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 1 5 

self-exhibition, can stand in place of 
that ideal which is characterized by 
the quiet efflorescence of what is 
noblest, purest, and best in each of 
us. This, in its highest terms, is 
Landor's theory of life. Indeed, if 
he had had a stronger hold upon in- 
tuitive truths, his standpoint might 
have approached very near to that of 
the Grseco-Puritan Emerson ; and 
one does not wonder that the latter 
had studied with delight the dia- 
logues of Landor before his memo- 
rable visit to the Villa Gherardescha, 
which is recorded in the English 
Traits. 

Nor does Landor express the 
other distinctive feature of his time 
— its scepticism. His was not "the 
spirit that denies." To parade a 
shallow agnosticism would have met 
Landor's contemptuous disapproval. 
And surely, if Professor Huxley is 
speaking with accuracy when he 



1 6 Walter Savage Landor, 

contends that agnosticism is merely 
a method and not a confession of 
faith, or rather of doubt, he need 
give himself no airs for having 
brought such a method to light, for 
his mental attitude is nothing other 
than the characteristic one of every 
modern investigator. It is merely 
the de omnibus dubito of Descartes, 
the basal idea of modern thinking. 
It, however, is only a callow scepti- 
cism that would require all convic- 
tion to be grounded upon logic, 
would apotheosize a part of man's 
soul, his reasoning faculty — not recog- 
nizing him as a spiritual unit, with 
the power, among others, of intui- 
tive belief. Landor, however, did 
not take this negative position, but 
was fundamentally a Comtean in 
religious matters. The speculative 
side of Christianity he placed no 
emphasis upon ; and the decline of 
faith could have excited in him no 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 1 7 

such lyrical laments as it did in Mat- 
thew Arnold. Landor approached 
religion just as he approached all 
sides of life, from the individualistic 
standpoint. He never wearies in 
his dialogues of emphasizing the 
antithesis between the morality of 
states or sects and the sayings of 
Christ. And while his emotions did 
not penetrate the divine meaning of 
humility and self-renunciation, and 
his experience was foreign to such 
influences, he never, on the other 
hand, made the mistake of suppos- 
ing that the strength of Christianity 
lay in a Hellenic Judaism, which 
sees a dogmatic content in the sim- 
plest moral precept of our Lord. 
The dialogues between Middleton 
and Magliabecchi, Timotheus and 
Lucian, Melancthon and Calvin, 
though not taking fairly into ac- 
count the impossibility of divorcing 
practice from its source — theory, 



1 8 Walter Savage Landor, 

show, nevertheless, Landor's firm 
grasp upon this idea, that Christ- 
ianity, as he makes Romilly say in 
* another dialogue, " lies not in be- 
lief, but in action." And Melanc- 
thon fitly closes his discussion with 
Calvin by declaring that " there 
is nothing on earth divine besides 
humanity." 

One is tempted to draw an anal- 
ogy here between Landor and 
Goethe. German was the only world 
literature that always remained a 
closed door to him. And when we 
recall the abstractness of thought, 
the pomposity of style, the mystical 
romanticism of our Teutonic neigh- 
bors, we feel that Landor, the classi- 
cist, missed less by his inability to 
read this language than most other 
men of as large mental calibre. 
After an inadequate acquaintance 
with Goethe, Landor, in his usual 
categorical fashiorf, pronounced him- 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 1 9 

self disgusted with " the corrugated 
spicery of metaphysics," which he 
was pleased to find in the writings 
of the great German. Nevertheless, 
these two men had points in com- 
mon. One side of Goethe's nature 
was Greek, the other side intensely 
modern. Landor in one aspect re- 
sembled the Greek, in the other the 
Roman. They met, therefore, on 
common Hellenic ground. Goethe 
looked at things from the critic's 
standpoint. He lightly disengaged 
himself from the object, and then 
with perfect self-poise studied its 
effectiveness. Landor, for all his 
Hellenism, could rarely become so 
disinterested ; the active ethical im- 
pulse was ever and again pulling at 
his heart-strings. It is not, however, 
our purpose to draw out these lines 
of community or difference, but sim- 
ply to quote a passage from Goethe 
which gives expression to a positivism 



20 Walter Savage Landor. 

similar to Landor's. Goethe says : 
" But an able man, who has something 
to do here, and must toil and strive 
day by day to accomplish it, leaves 
the future world till it comes, and 
contents himself with being active 
and useful in this." Nevertheless, 
Goethe's positivism, unlike Landor's, 
is occasionally lighted up by flashes 
of insight into the very life of things, 
as in the Prologue in Heaven in 
Faust, an allegory infinite in its 
suggestiveness. 

It is evident from what has been 
said that Landor cannot be repre- 
sented as one of the mouth-pieces of 
his time, since he was not coerced 
by the logic of contemporary events 
to the choice of standpoints coinci- 
dent with those of his fellow-think- 
ers, but when he x took such similar 
positions was constrained by the 
necessity of his own temperament 
rather than by external influences. 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 2 1 

In other words, Landor was an ideal- 
ist whose intellectual life lay in the 
past. 

It might be contended, however, 
that in his literary criticism and his 
political writings Landor's interests 
are plainly concerned with the pres- 
ent, and that he is here unquestion- 
ably the child of his age. This is 
only partially true. It is conceded 
that much of Landor's criticism is 
devoted to his contemporaries, and is 
largely appreciative. In one of the 
Imaginary Conversations, Southey 
and Porson discuss with much dis- 
crimination the merits and defects 
of Wordsworth's poetry, and pass in 
review the Laodamia, whose classic 
restraint naturally appealed to a 
lover of Homer and ^Eschylus. Lan- 
dor is even catholic enough to ad- 
mire writers so at variance from his 
own standard as Dickens and Robert 
Browning. Nevertheless, the large 



22 Walter Savage Landor. 

prerogatives which criticism has as- 
sumed in this age were not at all well 
understood by him. He sometimes 
deals hard blows against the Edin- 
burgh and Quarterly Reviews, yet 
his own criticism is not always es- 
sentially different from Lord Jef- 
frey's or Gifford's. Landor was fond 
of impressing his " whim upon the 
immutable past," and his hot-headed 
admiration or repugnance frequently 
disabled him from striking that care- 
ful balance which is necessary to 
sane literary judgments. Indeed 
his estimates rarely appear to be 
thoroughly reasoned. They concern 
themselves almost entirely with 
qualities of style, and do not pene- 
trate the personality of the author 
and grasp his relation to his period. 
As Mr. John Morley admirably puts 
it : " Minor verse-writers may fairly 
be consigned, without disrespect, to 
the region of the literature of taste ; 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 2 3 

and criticism of their work takes the 
shape of a discussion of stray graces, 
of new turns of thought, of little 
variations of shade and color, of 
their conformity to the accepted 
rules that constitute the technique 
of poetry. The loftier masters . . . 
besides these precious gifts, come to 
us with the size and quality of great 
historic forces, for they represent the 
hopes and energies, the dreams and 
the consummation of the human in- 
telligence in its most enormous move- 
ments." Every important writer, 
therefore, is the delegate of a vast 
intellectual and moral constituency, 
for whose needs he seeks to legis- 
late. Landor himself never was, nor 
sought to be, such a social force ; 
and he did not view other writers 
under this aspect. While Carlyle 
and later critics have entered into 
deep sympathy with Dante, regard- 
ing him as the efflorescence of 



2 4 Walter Savage Landor, 

scholasticism and chivalry, Landor 
studied the great Florentine as an 
isolated phenomenon, and thus lost 
the sense of historic perspective. 

Nor does Landor exhibit that 
close psychologic and philosophical 
insight which great critics, like Cole- 
ridge and Amiel, possess. Landor's 
criticism makes slight endeavor to 
seize upon an author's philosophy 
of life and his organizing ideas, and 
fails to trace the obscure links be- 
tween the personality of a writer 
and his literary contributions. Au- 
thors are not mere logic machines. 
Landor himself has beautifully said : 
"The heart is the creator of the 
poetical world ; only the atmosphere 
is from the brain." Hence the busi- 
ness of the critic is to examine the 
emotive and ethical impulses that 
lie at the root of the intellectual life. 
For this kind of penetrative, sympa- 
thetic criticism, Landor had few fc tal- 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 2 5 

ents. His judgments, on the other 
hand, consist in a somewhat arbi- 
trary assertion, generally couched in 
exquisite imagery, of one writer's 
superiority over another. Now, 
nothing is easier, and, I may add, 
nothing is more inconclusive than 
for a critic to insist upon arranging 
his victims according to his own 
ready-made, graduated scale of ex- 
cellence. This defect is not rare 
even among critics of note. Not 
only Landor, but Arnold, in his 
reasoned dogmatism, and Swin- 
burne, in his intuitional dogmatism, 
are too prone to set up their own 
personal estimate of the rank of 
an author as the supreme tribunal 
from which there is no appeal. 
Whereas, it must be apparent that 
whether one shall assert Thackeray 
to be a greater novelist than Dick- 
ens, or George Eliot's Middlemarch 
a finer novel than Mrs. Ward's 



26 Walter Savage Landor. 

Robert Elsniere, will depend largely 
upon temperament, not to speak of 
other causes: and since none of us 
can boast the possession of an ideal 
temperament, with faculties ideally 
adjusted and harmonized ; in the 
midst of the many possible criteria, 
both intellectual and aesthetic, it be- 
comes the part of wisdom and hu- 
mility quietly to justify the faith 
that is in us, so to speak, without 
representing our faith as the meas- 
ure of the credible. Arnold's 
exaggerated valuation of Byron, 
Swinburne's of Victor Hugo, and 
Landor's of his friend and coadjutor, 
Southey, are to be classed, there- 
fore, as deflections from tactful, 
well-reasoned criticism. The last 
mentioned preference reminds us, 
perhaps unjustly, of Dr. Johnson's 
remark, that "the reciprocal civility 
of authors is one of the most risible 
scenes in the farce of life." 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 2 7 

Now, although we dare not retract 
any of these strictures upon Lan- 
dor's critical power, yet we would be 
confessing ourselves deficient in this 
faculty did we not acknowledge his 
invariably fine perception on the 
formal side of literature. Landor's 
catholic range of reading, and his 
born instinct for expression enabled 
him — as we shall have frequent oc- 
casion to note in treating of his own 
style — to appraise the literary quali- 
ties of many authors both ancient 
and modern, with much aesthetic fi- 
nesse and in terms that, in their way, 
are final. Nevertheless, just as we 
would not suppose ourselves to have 
exhausted a good painting, when we 
had estimated the effects of perspec- 
tive, light and shade, tone and grad- 
ation, and the other technicalities, 
but would seek above all to enter 
into the emotional life of the artist, 
and to extract the idea of the pic- 



28 Walter Savage Landor. 

ture ; so we cannot pluck out the 
heart of the mystery in a work of 
prose or poetry by directing our crit- 
ical scalpels merely to the more or 
less superficial phenomena of form, 
but must also question an author as 
to his organizing ideas. It is true, 
however, that matter and form, idea 
and execution, are so fused that the 
formal element is never wholly su- 
perficial. An affected style is just as 
really a negative index of thought 
and character as are the positive 
indices, simplicity and sincerity. 
Hence, the critic who discriminates 
nicely the forms of things may be in 
a fair way to appreciate the things 
themselves. 

The final plea that might be made 
in behalf of Landor as a social force, 
and as illustrative of his age, would 
be drawn from his political composi- 
tions. Born at the beginning of the 
American Revolution, and dying near 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 29 

the close of our Civil War, and all 
through his life feeling an intense 
sympathy in English and Continental 
politics, Landor would seem to be 
peculiarly fitted to take a compre- 
hensive and disinterested view of 
European polity. It remains true, 
however, that his political diatribes 
and conversations are the least bal- 
anced, the most ephemeral, of his 
productions. In many of them, this 
fact might be ascribed to the neces- 
sity of the case ; since even a spir- 
ited refutation of some partisan meas- 
ure, arising from the exigency of the 
moment, could not be expected to 
have enough permanent applicability 
to keep it alive amid the fading cir- 
cumstances which it celebrated. This 
explanation, however, is not suffi- 
cient. The main fault lay in Lan- 
dor's unbridled enthusiasm, and his 
inability to make careful inductions. 
Aroused by an exalted longing for 



30 Walter Savage Landor, 

liberty and justice, Landor lost all 
power of discrimination. Every Pole 
or Italian or Greek who fought for 
freedom was an angel of light, and 
all their opponents were angels of 
darkness. Proceeding upon this pos- 
tulate, Landor indulges in rhetoric, 
idealistic and grandiose. At times 
there is a resonance in his periods 
equal to the most dignified utterances 
of Cicero. Yet because of his impa- 
tient contempt for considerations of 
expediency or compromise, because 
of his hot-headed political idealism, 
he usually fails so to grasp the situ- 
ation as to make his appeals tell. 
Perhaps if he had entertained some- 
what more regard for the man of 
statecraft, and had tried, now and 
then, to take the politician's point 
of view, his pleas might have pos- 
sessed more weight. 

As it was, Landor cannot be called 
a normal citizen. His social rela- 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 3 1 

tionships were of the most varied 
and delightful sort, but his political 
ties were virtually non-existent — ex- 
cept when he got into one of his nu- 
merous squabbles with the Italian 
police or with some other officials at 
home or abroad. True, while at 
Llanthony, he sought to obtain a 
magistracy ; and how like an out- 
raged Roman did he behave when 
for some petty reason it was refused 
him. Yet all through his life, sub- 
sequent to his youthful experience 
as a disciple of that whimsical old 
pedant and politician, Dr. Parr, Lan- 
dor held himself aloof from practical 
politics, and even boasted, after the 
manner of Thoreau, that he had 
never entered a club, and never cast 
a vote. Knowing this, we sometimes 
grow impatient with his oft-repeated 
tirades against the politician, and 
his dogmatic insistance on the supe- 
riority of the man of letters. We 



32 Walter Savage Landor. 

feel at such times that Landor pre- 
fers heat to light. 

Holding the idea of war in noble 
detestation, Landor was wont to in- 
sist, with much show of seriousness, 
upon the justifiability of tyrannicide. 
And he makes Demosthenes say, 
characteristically : " Rapine and li- 
centiousness are the precursors and 
followers of even the most righteous 
war. A single blow against the 
worst of mortals may prevent them. 
Many years and much treasure are 
usually required for an uncertain 
issue, besides the stagnation of traf- 
fic the prostration of industry, the 
innumerable maladies arising from 
towns besieged, and regions depopu- 
lated. A moment is sufficient to 
avert all these calamities. No usurp- 
er, no invader, should be permitted 
to exist on earth." Nothing could 
illustrate better than this Landor's 
emphatic recognition of the power 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 33 

inherent in chosen individuals. With 
a sublime disregard of what we now 
call the force of heredity and en- 
vironment, — comprehending in this 
phrase social custom and individual 
habit, and sentiments which outlive 
the ideas producing them, all those 
subtle and manifold causes, mental 
and material, which superimpose 
their weight upon personality, — 
Landor seems to look upon men and 
things as pawns which a tyrant can 
dispose of according to his whim. 
This individualistic idealism, which 
could slur over whole series of causes, 
rendered him incapable of entering 
into the inner life of history, as it 
is seen in the action of masses of 
men. Thus, for example, the philo- 
sophic aspect of that greatest of all 
cataclysms, the French Revolution, 
was without its full rationale to Lan- 
dor's mind. That the streams of 
tendency which proceeded from the 



34 Walter Savage Landor, 

Aufkldrung, — from the Encyclopae- 
dists, from Rousseau, and the rest, — 
uniting with the pent-up emotions 
of a people downtrodden by priest 
and noble, but at last awakened to a 
sense of their prerogatives, should 
flow on with ever-accelerated speed 
to the horrors of 1792, was certainly 
a spectacle calculated to excite the 
intense interest of all on-lookers. 
Yet we do not find Landor following 
the drama with the intelligent sym- 
pathy of Wordsworth or Coleridge. 
There is a germ of truth in Carlyle's 
saying, reported by Emerson, that 
" Landor's principle was mere rebel- 
lion." Relative to this time, Forster 
says of him : " He reasoned little, 
but his instincts were all against 
authority, or what took to him the 
form of its abuse." Thus he sided 
with the French Republic, but he 
did so without an adequate insight 
into the causes from which it 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 35 

sprang or the direction in which it 
tended. 

In several ways a parallel might be 
drawn between the political princi- 
ples of Landor and those of Milton. 
Both were iconoclasts ; both were 
apostles of the idea, but while Mil- 
ton's a priori reasoning was the nat- 
ural outcome of his age, Landor's 
was opposed to the inductive spirit, 
which is ever growing stronger and 
more effective ; both longed for the 
time when the few virtuous and wise 
would bear rule, yet without creating 
any definite constructive scheme by 
which their hopes might be realized. 
Both must take a second rank as 
political thinkers, — though Milton, 
of course, stands far above Landor, 
— because both failed so to ground 
their aspirations upon sound prece- 
dent and present conditions as that 
a rejuvenescent future could, by their 
efforts, grow out of the past, as the 



36 Walter Savage Landor. 

flower from its stalk. Both abhorred 
a many-headed Demos, where, in- 
stead of one tyrant, there are thou- 
sands. Indeed Landor could never 
bring himself to stomach our own 
republican institutions, regarding 
them in somewhat the same light 
as did Matthew Arnold. Landor 
loved the distinction and charm 
which emanate from a true nobility ; 
and while he also loved the people 
he loved them as some of us do — at 
a dignified distance. 

But it may suddenly be asked : 
" If all this is true of Landor; if he 
neither portrays the life of his age, 
nor represents its tendencies, and if, 
even in those occupations where he 
attempted to affect his generation, 
in criticism and political pamphlet, 
he does not vitally affect it, just what 
is his claim upon the lover of litera- 
ture and of life?" If the converse 
of Spinoza's famous dictum be true, 



Landor as a Man of Letters, 3 7 

if all negation be determination, as 
it undoubtedly is, then our efforts at 
estimating Landor by a process of 
exclusion have not been valueless. 
Notwithstanding, it is high time to 
give some positive reasons for regard- 
ing him as a master in-the— field of 
thought and expression ; and this we 
can now do with a clear conscience 
and without reservations. 

Landor was, in its most exclusive 
sense, a literary man. Unlike so 
many in our own day he made no 
serious attempt, except it might be 
in his pleas for spelling reform, to 
combine literature with any kind of 
propagandism, philosophical, scien- 
tific, religious, or ethical. He came 
near to trying this in his political 
writings ; but, as we saw, he was 
there ineffective. Furthermore, Lan- 
dor was a deep student and portrayer 
of the past. But we prefer not to 
place too much emphasis upon his 



38 Walter Savage Landor. 

classical and pagan cast of mind ; be- 
cause we regard such catch-words as 
inexact and misleading. Landor was 
a member of no sect which might 
wave its classical or romantic banner. 
And if he was at home in ancient 
Greece, he was also acclimated to the 
Italy of Petrarch and Boccaccio, and 
the England of Shakspeare or of 
Cromwell. In nothing is he more 
distinctive than in his haughty inde- 
pendence of mere models. Like the 
artist of the early Renaissance, nature 
was his teacher, and he knew no other. 
This fact constitutes one of his claims 
upon our consideration ; for any man 
who can look upon the drama of life 
about him, and into his own soul, and 
then tell what he sees, will always 
afford the needed spectacles for our 
purblind eyes. Landor was, as Mrs. 
Browning well said, " most Greek, 
because most English " ; since it is 
not he who mimics the Greeks, but 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 39 

he who does as the Greeks did, 
namely, follows nature — he it is who 
possesses their spirit. Therefore, it 
is not as an antiquarian that we 
would eulogize Landor. Indeed, 
when he plays this role, he is rarely 
successful; for his scholarship was 
not of that infinitely painstaking 
sort which requires everything, down 
to the lacing of a sandal, to conform 
to the original. Landor listened to 
the men and women around him, he 
listened to the beatings of his own 
sympathetic heart ; and then, with 
these tones still ringing in his soul, 
he shut his eyes ; and lo, long pro- 
cessions of the good, the great, and 
the unfortunate of former days filed 
before him ; he watched their pensive 
gestures, he caught their calm reflec- 
tions or their impassioned replies ; 
and straightway he chiselled and 
polished the fast vanishing scene 
in statuesque verse or monumental 



40 Walter Savage Landor. 

prose. Landor, therefore, fixed his 
gaze neither upon a model nor an 
audience, but upon the object it- 
self. Such a consecrated ideal of 
authorship will always, as it did in 
Landor's case, bear its measure of 
fruit. 

One of the ways of appreciating 
Landor's works is to approach them 
through the medium of his person- 
ality. As a man he was as unique as 
Oliver Goldsmith or Dr. Johnson. 
In outward appearance he stood for 
the prince and lion among men — his 
face showing great force and aggres- 
siveness, with high arched brow, 
strongly moulded nose, and a mouth 
whose downward curving lines sug- 
gest a passionate and even caustic 
nature. Yet, in the presence of his 
friends, and especially of ladies, this 
face could beam with a wealth of 
old-world grace and courtesy, his 
whole demeanor bespeaking that 



Landor as a Man of Letters, 4 1 

dignity and deference which the rapid 
intercourse of our later day rarely 
takes time for. His actions, his biog- 
raphers tell us, were a trifle awkward 
— not, of course, from ill-breeding, 
but from the aimlessness of the un- 
practical man. And, indeed, in its 
way, we may imagine that this fact 
made his manners all the more at- 
tractive. In his not infrequent fits 
of ungovernable passion, it is said 
that his thumbs were not clinched, 
but relaxed, this seeming to indicate 
that his rage was louder than it was 
deep, that it was a habit of speech 
and gesture rather than the dethrone- 
ment of personality, and the entire 
subordination of will to animal im- 
pulse. In other words, it is probable 
that Landor never completely lost 
himself in these wild exhibitions of 
temper, — that he never completely 
sacrificed his freedom to a mere 
brutish determinism. While the 



42 Walter Savage Landor. 

surface of his soul was in turmoil the 
depths lay undisturbed. 

Too much emphasis has been 
placed upon Landor's impetuous, 
ungovernable temperament by his 
critics. To insist upon this side of 
his character is to view him superfi- 
cially. It is as though one should 
put special stress upon Sir Walter 
Scott's lameness, or Charles Lamb's 
propensity to stammer. Landor's 
pride and anger never penetrated 
into the sanctuary of his soul-life, 
and profaned his better nature. They 
were merely uproarious protestations 
against an ungenial environment. 
And in almost every case, if the 
motives which animated his wild 
outbreaks should be examined, they 
would be found noble, though mis- 
applied. Possessed of a just regard 
for his dignity and high desert, he 
was all aflame at the suspicion of a 
slight. Thus there is something 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 43 

amusing, if it were not so pathetic, 
in Landor's majestic letter to Lord 
Normanby, in retort upon this Eng- 
lish minister's cold reception of him 
at the Cascine, in the presence of 
"innumerable Florentines." This was 
in Landor's old age, after his gen- 
erosity and gallant attentions to a 
young girl at Bath had been shame- 
fully misrepresented ; and he, having 
resorted to his old childish weapons 
of satiric verse, had been obliged to 
pay a heavy fine, and had left his 
native country, sorrow-stricken yet 
unconquered. The letter closes with 
these majestic words : " We are both 
of us old men, my lord, and are 
verging on decrepitude and imbe- 
cility, else my note might be more 
energetic. I am not inobservant of 
distinctions. You by the favor of a 
minister are the Marquis of Nor- 
manby, I by the grace of God am 
" Walter Savage Landor." 



44 Walter Savage Landor, 

Indeed, the six years that Landor 
lived after the Bath scandal are so 
filled with pathetic material that his 
indiscretions of former days are for- 
gotten in our indignation at the 
exasperating treatment which " the 
old lion " received, even at the hands 
of his own family, and in our admi- 
ration for the general nobility of his 
aims. And it must be borne in mind 
that Landor's wrath was aroused 
by an affront or insult done to others 
as effectually as though it had been 
done to himself. His anger was a 
perversion of a noble attribute — 
an unbending, though not always 
accurate, sense of justice. There- 
fore, if Professor Dowden means 
to convey a weighty observation, 
when he remarks that the first thing 
one is tempted to say of Landor is, 
that he was emphatically " an unciv- 
ilized man," he is giving by no means 
a fair impression of our author's 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 45 

character. Landor was, like Car- 
lyle or Emerson, or other great per- 
sonages, somewhat of an aboriginal 
man. It was inherent in his nature 
to make unique estimates. He never 
sought to drain the currents of his 
thought into established channels, 
but preferred above all things to 
place his own independent construc- 
tion upon the facts of the universe. 
This construction, however, was not 
always the sound product of reflec- 
tion. Too often it was the result of 
unreasoning prejudice, of likes and 
dislikes canonized by mere dint of 
repetition. Nevertheless, even these 
ideas have their interest as proceed- 
ing from a massive and original per- 
sonality. While ordinary men dress, 
think, and act after the pattern of 
their day, extraordinary men create 
a taste rather than conform to one. 
From the common man's standpoint 
Landor was certainly uncivilized. 



46 Walter Savage Landor. 

He was uncivilized in his flaring 
bursts of anger. But his passion 
was not a fire smouldering unsus- 
pected beneath the ashes. It was 
the sudden response of a proud and, 
withal, a gracious nature. Therefore, 
to apply the word uncivilized to one 
of Landor's exquisite refinement and 
delicacy ; to him whose princely po- 
liteness, even such a connoisseur as 
Lady Blessington signalized, and 
whose representations of women, 
and of all that is beautiful and suave, 
have been surpassed neither by an- 
cient nor modern, — is ill-timed as well 
as inaccurate. 

Landor was, as we have intimated, 
a man, generous, ardent, and sincere. 
We do not therefore propose to go 
over the tiresome list of his misun- 
derstandings and quarrels with fel- 
low-students, teachers, father, wife, 
friends, publishers, and civil officials. 
His biographers give us little more 



Landor as . a Man of Letters. 4 7 

than the bare facts in the case ; 
the mitigating circumstances and 
explanations we are usually left to 
infer as best we may. We must 
judge Landor by his high ideal of 
dignified and gracious conduct rather 
than by his performance, which may 
have been ludicrously undignified. 
Viewed from a somewhat external 
and unsympathetic standpoint, the 
world is hopelessly vulgar. It seems 
to care so little for intellectual pur- 
suits. It lives in an atmosphere 
where ideas look so hazy, and gold is 
more dazzling than the sun. It is 
only natural, therefore, that an un- 
practical idealist like Landor should 
have found the world a place hard to 
breathe in. He preferred to walk 
"alone on the far eastern uplands, 
meditating and remembering." He 
even goes so far as to write to Lady 
Blessington : " Most things are real 
to me, except realities." And in- 



48 Walter Savage Landor, 

deed, Landor seems to have let the 
reality of family ties hang about 
him but loosely. Thus, in the spring 
of 1835 he could leave his fair Italian 
home, his wife and children, without 
apparently any violent wrench with 
the past, and without any excruciat- 
ing compunctions, because, forsooth, 
his wife's temper did not quite tally 
with his own proud, commanding 
ways. For years afterward he could 
lead an independent life at Bath, not 
allowing the thought of his duty as 
husband and father to interrupt an 
agreeable social intercourse or a 
pleasant trend of meditation. And 
after grief had passed " into near 
Memory's more quiet shade," he 
could say good-bye to Italy in this 
impersonal manner : 

" I leave thee, beauteous Italy ! no more 
From the high terraces, at even-tide, 
To look supine into thy depths of sky, 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 49 

Thy golden moon between the cliff 

and me, 
Or thy dark spires of fretted cypresses 
Bordering the channel of the milky 

way." 

While one cannot but feel the 
charm of these lines, as a natural de- 
scription, it were well if they had 
been ethicalized, so to speak, by a 
few regrets at parting from wife and 
children, by a few compunctions at 
severing the most responsible and 
enduring of ties. But Landor, un- 
like most persons, does not appear 
to have minded these sudden breaks 
in his existence. All that he re- 
quired was an ideal or imaginative 
continuity of life. If he only had 
the worthies of former days that he 
might glory in their deeds and weep 
over their sufferings, he was content. 
In examining such a character, it is 
therefore more profitable to ask how 
he realized himself in his writings 



5<D Walter Savage Landor, 

than how he failed to realize himself 
in the exasperating concerns of daily- 
life. Of Landor, as indeed of most 
authors, it is manifest that his books 
are his truest self. 

A first word to be said of Landor 
as a literary man is, that he was 
unswervingly original. He repre- 
sented the Independent in the Re- 
public of Letters. He was an avowed 
enemy to the prevailing habit of 
quotation, and he stoutly refused to 
put into the mouth of his speakers 
any sentiments that history might 
have ascribed to them. He sought 
by his fine historic imagination to 
catch and portray real men, not their 
mannerisms. This proud indepen- 
dent spirit was the source of his 
strength and of his weakness. On the 
one hand, it led him to uphold the 
dignity and disinterestedness of lit- 
erature, and to aim above all things 
at satisfying his own exacting sense 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 5 1 

for literary form. On the other hand, 
it brought him into conflict with his 
audience. There is a just mean be- 
tween the low men-pleaser and the 
literary aristocrat. And this mean 
Landor never took the pains to strike. 
He is either unsympathetic with his 
readers, or else oblivious of them. 
Therefore he sometimes leaves his 
meaning needlessly opaque. His 
ideal, comprehending a classic sever- 
ity and restraint of speech, he makes 
no effort to supply his audience with 
necessary sequences and comfortable 
transitions. He sometimes cuts away 
the ground, so that it requires an 
agile imagination to take the leap 
from point to point. This fact goes 
some way toward accounting for 
Landor's unpopularity, the reasons 
for which have been discussed by his 
critics ad nauseam. And relevant to 
this discussion we may remark, that, 
to judge from recent attractive edi- 



52 Walter Savage Landor. 

tions of the Imaginary Conversa- 
tions, the Examination of Shakspeare, 
and the Pericles and Astasia, what 
has been satirized as Landor's " late- 
dinner theory " bids fair to be real- 
ized, notwithstanding the head-shak- 
ings of dubious critics. 

Landor's high ideal of authorship 
is seen in his manner of writing. His 
carefulness showed itself, not so much 
in his collection of materials, as in 
his efforts after adequacy of expres- 
sion. For his facts he depended 
upon a tenacious memory, which 
could open at will the vast store- 
house of his reading and reflection. 
Landor's library, at any one time, was 
small. Actuated by an inveterate 
generosity, he mastered a book and 
then gave it away. But notwith- 
standing this lack, he could write 
letters between Pericles and Aspasia 
which are so fraught with Hellenic 
grace and beauty, even down to the 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 53 

merest detail, that only a lifeless 
antiquary would be so irrelevant as 
to insist upon historic inaccuracies. 
And in regard to style, that man 
must indeed be a master in the art 
of literary expression who would 
pick serious flaws in Landor's work- 
manship. This perfection of form 
sprang partly from a gift, and partly 
from a faculty for taking pains. Lan- 
dor used to compose in the open 
air, surrounded by the flowers and 
dumb creatures, which he looked 
upon as humble companions. Here 
his sympathetic, fibrous voice might 
be heard repeating and testing his sen- 
tences, until they became as beauti- 
fully modulated as a cathedral organ 
in the hands of a master musician. 
His whole soul was in his work, and 
he was deeply sincere when he said : 
" I hate false words, and seek with 
care, difficulty, and moroseness those 
that fit the thing." He could not 



54 Walter Savage Landor, 

divert his imagination from the par- 
ticular subject under way, and was 
at a loss to conceive how Southey 
was able to compose two poems at 
onetime. " When I write a poem, 
my heart and all my feelings are 
upon it. I never commit adultery 
with another, and high poems will 
not admit flirtation." It is indeed 
hard to find the literary conscience 
as fully developed as it was in Lan- 
dor. There is, however, at least one 
other instance on record, — that of 
the French novelist Flaubert, who 
was almost a fanatic on style, and 
used to exclaim in thunderous tones: 
" No, the only important and endur- 
ing thing under the sun, is a well 
formed sentence, a sentence with 
hand and foot, that harmonizes with 
the sentences preceding and follow- 
ing it, and that falls pleasantly on 
the ear when it is read." And Flau- 
bert, they say, would relentlessly 



Landor as a Man of Letters, 55 

pursue a repeated word, even at the 
distance of thirty or forty lines, and 
so much as the recurrence of the 
same syllable in the same sentence 
annoyed him. Sometimes, becoming 
dissatisfied with a single letter, he 
would spare no pains till he had 
lighted upon a substitute word. 
Such struggles to attain perfection 
remind one of the all-night agony 
that Landor experienced, when he 
thought he had been guilty of a false 
quantity, in making the first vowel 
of the word flagrans short, in one of 
his Latin poems, which he had just 
before sent off for publication. 

These efforts, as we have intimated, 
were not in vain. The texture of 
Landor's style represents an exquisite 
blending of diversified materials. 
And though there maybe rents now 
and then in the thought, there are at 
least no visible patches in the ex- 
pression. Moreover, the style is an 



56 Walter Savage Landor. 

admirable exposition of the man 
himself, its primary qualities being 
rightly of an ethical rather than of a 
purely intellectual cast. While at 
times Landor condescends to sculp- 
ture his sentences in a winning, 
graceful, Praxitelean way, he is in 
the main characteristically epic, his 
periods possessing the dignity and 
massiveness of Phidian marbles. By 
epic, I refer to his grand com- 
pendious manner, and would not be 
understood to imply that our author 
has that " divine fluidity of move- 
ment," which Matthew Arnold finds 
to be so characteristic of Homer and 
Chaucer. Indeed, it is just the ab- 
sence of this, that one notices in 
Landor's prose, which is not pro- 
gressive, but is rather a series of 
sentences organically related, yet at 
the same time semi-detached, each 
standing out in bold relief. This 
peculiarity is what we would call the 



Landor as a Man of Letters, 57 

static quality of Landor's prose. And 
we by no means criticise his work- 
manship because it possesses this 
quality to such a high degree ; since, 
for the utterance of solid reflections 
upon human nature, this is the ideal 
style — a style where the sentences 
are made up of semi-independent 
clauses, and where all is eminently 
direct, simple, and urbane. 

But when this dignified and some- 
what sententious manner is made the 
vehicle for writing of a dramatic 
rather than a reflective cast, there 
results a species of classicism, which 
Landor's dialogues of action splen- 
didly exhibit. And as the word 
classic is frequently used in a vague, 
indiscriminate way, it is well to mark 
that this peculiarity, namely, the 
expression of impassioned thought 
in terms of strict grammatical so- 
briety, is one of the several features 
of the classicist. Unwilling to con- 



58 Walter Savage Landor. 

tort his style or to sacrifice ideal 
excellence to a crude realism, Landor 
was careful that his personages should 
maintain a certain degree of regular- 
ity and precision of utterance, even 
in the most animated dialogues. And 
as all true art is a spiritual interpre- 
tation of nature and the human soul, 
and is selective, and therefore above 
reality, he was justified in the result. 
In this respect Landor somewhat re- 
sembles Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, 
as Mr. Lathrop says, " could scarcely 
permit his actors to speak loosely or 
ungrammatically. ,, 

But after the knife of criticism has 
done its best to dissect the charm of 
a style like Landor's, the essence of 
its beauty, so volatile and yet so real, 
has vanished ; and we must be con- 
tent to admire even if we cannot 
fully formulate our admiration. Suf- 
fice it to say, that Landor's wonderful 
style, taken in connection with the 



Landor as a Man of Letters. 59 

delicate aphorisms, the weighty re- 
flections, and the noble and beautiful 
scenes from the drama of human life 
— which he has given us in the books 
we are about to examine more par- 
ticularly, — is enough to secure him 
a permanent place in literature. A 
very few writers, like Aristotle, live 
by sheer force of thought ; the vast 
majority live by the force of a fine 
style in vital union with fine thought. 
Landor belongs to this latter class. 



II. 

LANDOR'S POETRY. 



61 



II. 

LANDOR'S POETRY. 

Though Landor was wont to refer 
to verse as his pastime, and prose as 
his occupation, still the quality of 
much of his poetry is high enough 
to merit an appreciative recognition. 
Brought up according to the English 
school system, which trains the youth 
to acquire a facility in scribbling 
Latin verses, Landor, as was natural, 
took so readily to the translation 
of Greek and Roman themes into 
rhymed pentameters, that by his 
twentieth year he had gotten out his 
first volume of English and Latin po- 
ems, some satiric, others descriptive. 
What especially strikes one in the 
63 



64 Walter Savage Landor. 

selections which Forster has pre- 
served of these verses is their con- 
ventional manner. 

" So, when Medea, on her native strand, 
Beheld the Argo lessen from the land ; 
The tender pledges of her love she 

bore, 
Frantic, and raised them high above 

the shore. 
'Thus, thus may Jason, faithless as 

he flies, 
Faithless and heedless of Medea's 

' cries, 
Behold his babes, oppose the adverse 

gales, 
Return to Colchis those retiring 

sails.' " 

This is the artificial sing-song of 
Pope's muse. 

Yet by his twenty-third year Lan- 
dor had brought out another poem 
Gebir, whose massive blank verse 
is as far removed from Pope as is 



Landors Poetry, 65 

the Paradise Lost from the Essay on 
Man. The advance is remarkable. 
Yet we do not agree with Forster in 
ascribing it to the effect of making 
translations. We would rather say 
that the efficient cause was Landor's 
careful and enthusiastic study of 
Milton. Some time after his rusti- 
cation from Oxford, Landor settled 
in a wild secluded spot of Wales. 
And here he fell in with Pindar, 
whose " proud complacency and 
scornful strength " he particularly 
noted, and whose poetry he resolved 
to imitate, at least as respects its 
weighty brevity and exclusiveness. 
Here, also, he used to declaim, with 
glowing admiration, the magnificent 
lines of Paradise Lost, and at last 
came to think that even the great 
hexameter sounded tinkling when 
he had recited aloud, in his solitary 
walks on the seashore, the haughty 
appeal of Satan and the repentance 



66 Walter Savage Landor. 

of Eve. It is, then, to the influence 
of our greatest master in the grand 
style that we would find Landor 
most indebted for the many fine 
qualities contained in the verse of 
Gebir. 

Before estimating the value of 
this poem, it is only just that we 
should make a general remark upon 
Landor as a poet — a remark which 
must tend irrevocably to fix his 
place in the choir of the muses. Un- 
like the genius of the great original 
bards, Landor's poetic talent does 
not seem to have sprung from an 
irresistible necessity of his soul 
towards self-expression. Nor does 
his poetry appear to have developed 
naturally from within outward, from 
the early lyric outpourings of a soli- 
tary soul to the later dramatic and 
epic representations, when the mind 
has grown more familiar with the 
world around it. On the contrary, 



Landors Poetry. 67 

Landor's first two considerable 
poems were an epic and a tragedy ; 
his later poetry was in the main 
pastoral or erotic. This develop- 
ment, or perhaps lack of develop- 
ment, is the reverse of the normal 
growth of a poet's mind, as is seen 
in Shakspeare or Milton, and sug- 
gests that Landor never felt the 
poetic impulse as a sacred and irre- 
sistible mission. He says in Gebir 
that there was aroused within him 
" the feverish thirst of song " ; but 
we believe that poetry was not to 
him, as it is to one inevitably a poet, 
the very water of life. Indeed, his 
reference to versification as a pas- 
time would of itself confirm this view. 
Nevertheless, Gebir, his first long 
poem, is remarkable both for the 
vivid force of imagination dis- 
played, and for the full tones of its 
blank verse. As a whole, the poem 
is a magnificent failure, the different 



68 Walter Savage Landor. 

parts being blocked together so ab- 
ruptly that it is wellnigh impossible^ 
without explanations, to get a satis- 
factory conception of the ensemble. 
Landor's admiration for Pindar, and 
his consequent desire to be " as com- 
pendious and exclusive," led him to 
cart off so many loads from Gebir 
(as he expressed it) that the transi- 
tions in the plot are not easy to 
follow. 

Moreover, the plot itself, which he 
took from a tale purporting to be 
Arabian, and which has for its idea 
to reprimand pride of conquest, is 
somewhat grotesque and improba- 
ble. Landor thought he saw in it 
magnificum quid sub crepusculo an- 
tiquitatis ; but at least he did not 
succeed in adequately conveying 
this quality. Indeed the parts that 
deal with the twilighted region, 
where the natural and the supernal 
converge are, to our mind at least, 



Landors Poetry. 69 

the weakest in the poem. Landor's 
real strength in poetry, as he him- 
self must have seen later, lay in a 
clear, chaste, objective rendering of 
the sunny, idyllic life which we are 
accustomed to associate with the 
Greeks, and which Theocritus, Bion, 
and Moschus have rendered im- 
mortally attractive and beautiful. 
And his most characteristic ideal, ex- 
pressed in the poetic prose by which 
Mr. J. A. Symonds describes Greek 
life, was a feast of " perpetual sun- 
shine and perpetual ease — no work 
from year to year that might de- 
grade the body or impair the mind, 
no dread of hell, no yearning after 
heaven, but summer-time of youth 
and autumn of old age, and loveless 
death be-wept and bravely borne." 
Landor was therefore incompetent 
to spiritualize and render deeply 
symbolic those parts of his poem 
which deal with the under world 



70 Walter Savage Landor. 

and with Masarian Marthyr, the sor- 
ceress. Indeed, Gebir's visit to the 
Shades is rendered almost ridiculous 
by his there encountering, despite 
the anachronism, the Stuarts and 
George III., who was ever Landor's 
detestation. What we miss, then, in 
this treatment is that air of super- 
natural realism, so prominent in 
another poem, which appeared the 
same year, the Rhyme of the An- 
cient Mariner. Landor is either 
too real and homely, as when Mar- 
thyr, after having indulged in the 
most outlandish scenic effects, ex- 
claims to Dalica : 

" Oh, what more pleasant than the short- 
breathed sigh, 

When, laying down your burthen at the 
gate, 

And, dizzy with long wanderings, you 
embrace 

The cool and quiet of a home-spun 
bed." 



Landors Poetry, 7 1 

For here we find it incompatible with 
our former notion of the terrible sor- 
ceress, who can shrivel in one breath 
the bones of her victims, " as all the 
sands we tread on could not in a thou- 
sand years," that she should conde- 
scend to the cool and quiet of a 
home-spun bed. Or else, on the 
other hand, Landor fails to excite 
emotion, because his horrors are too 
horrid to simulate probability even 
for a moment. There is, therefore, 
not that perfect blending of natural 
and supernatural elements which 
arouses our sense for the mysterious 
without conflicting with our sense for 
the probable. 

But after these abatements have 
been made, there remain passages, as 
for example the loves of Gebir and 
Tamar, and the nuptial morning, 
which, for purity of outline, incisive 
strokes, and at one time graceful 
psychologic touches, at another, 



72 Walter Savage Landor. 

strong, majestic lines, would bear 
comparison with portions of Keats' 
Hyperion, and would justify the warm 
admiration of a Shelley. Tamar's 
narrative of his encounter with the 
Nymph, for example, which contains 
the noted passage on the sea-shell, 
has all the directness and chaste re- 
straint which is characteristic of the 
best Greek art. And while the pic- 
ture of Charoba's nuptial morning 
may suggest somewhat ignobly the 
physical side of her passion for Gebir, 
yet many of the lines, notably those 
portraying her fears, are exquisitely 
handled. 

As regards the technical quality of 
the verse, we might criticise the 
unpleasant iteration of syllables, 
sometimes in the same line, as "Saw 
the blood mantle in his manly 
cheeks," also the tendency to awk- 
ward Latinized phraseology, as " Him 
overcome her serious voice bespake," 



Landors Poetry. jt> 

and the too regular beat of the blank 
verse; but we prefer rather to admire 
the frequent felicity, and, at times, 
the grandeur of expression. The 
following is worthy to stand with 
the introductory lines of the second 
book of Paradise Lost, as a splendid 
specimen of the periodic sentence: 

" Once a fair city, courted then by kings, 
Mistress of nations, thronged by 

palaces, 
Raising her head o'er destiny, her face 
Glowing with pleasure and with palms 

refreshed, 
Now pointed at by Wisdom or by 

Wealth, 
Bereft of beauty, bare of ornament, 
Stood in the wilderness of woe, Masar." 

This is one of the many places in 
Gebir that Shelley never tired of re- 
peating. 

But notwithstanding the admira- 
tion of a few select spirits — Shelley, 



74 Walter Savage Landor. 

Southey, Reginald Heber, De Quin- 
cey, and perhaps Coleridge, — Gebir 
fell upon the general public a dead 
failure. Landor was not honored by 
the vituperation which Wordsworth 
or Keats received, yet he came in 
for his modest share of the uncritical 
lashings which the critics of his day 
held it their privilege to impose upon 
a new and original author. This by 
no means destroyed his self-confi- 
dence, for he never doubted his own 
ability, he only doubted whether 
others could be made to recognize 
it ; still, applause does supplement 
and strengthen one's consciousness 
of merit and give just that final 
impulse which is needed to accom- 
plish great things. Landor felt this, 
and wrote to Southey : " The popular 'is 
aura, though we are ashamed or un- 
able to analyze it, is requisite for the 
health and growth of genius "; and 
again he wrote in his high and mighty 



Landors Poetry. 75 

way : " I confess to you, if even fool- 
ish men had read Gebir, I should 
have continued to write poetry, — 
there is something of summer in the 
hum of insects." 

As it was, he did not long abstain 
from versifying. Indeed, all through 
his life he was accustomed to vow, 
after some friction with public or 
publishers, that he would never again 
touch pen to paper ; and behold, the 
very next day would find him at 
work as sedulously as ever, produ- 
cing a new dialogue or poem. Only 
two years after the publication of 
Gebir y Landor had got out a little 
pamphlet of poems from the Arabic 
and Persian, purporting to have 
been rendered from a French trans- 
lation, and garnished with elaborate 
notes, which Mr. Colvin thinks were 
meant to mystify the reader. These 
effusions have not come down to us. 
But two years subsequent to this, 



J 6 Walter Savage Landor. 

there appeared Chrysaor and the 
Phocceans, two poems which are still 
preserved among Landor's collected 
works. The Phocceans is painfully- 
obscure, an unintelligible fragment ; 
but Chrysaor, which is also in its 
general drift somewhat puzzling, 
merits more attention. It has for 
its subject an incident in the war 
between the Gods and Titans, and 
thus foreshadows, as has been sug- 
gested, the Hyperion of Keats. In- 
deed there are in it sounding lines 
and felicities of phrase which a 
Keats need not have been ashamed 
to own. 

" The azure concave of their curling 
shells " 

is surely not without the magic of 
expression which we so much admire 
in the author of Lamia, and the Eve 
of St. Agnes. And in general, we 
may claim for the Chrysaor that as a 



Landors Poetry, 77 

specimen of massive blank verse it is 
comparable with many portions of 
Gebir and Count Julian, partaking of 
the character of Landor's early grand 
style as distinguished from the light 
graceful manner of the idyllic poems, 
which he wrote subsequently. And 
Mr. Colvin goes so far as to hold 
that the blank verse is more varied, 
and therefore finer, than the regu- 
larly modulated lines of Gebir. 

Notwithstanding this measure of 
accomplishment after his publication 
of Gebir, it remains true that Lan- 
dor's life from 1798 to about 1810 
was desultory and unproductive, this 
fact being perhaps partially due to 
the ill-success of his epic. How- 
ever, in the late summer of the latter 
year he began a tragedy, Count Ju- 
lian, which he completed by the be- 
ginning of the next spring. The 
scene of this drama is naturally laid 
in Spain, a country then exciting 



78 Walter Savage Landor. 

men's minds on account of the po- 
litical complications which had arisen 
from Napoleon's infamous efforts to 
place his brother Joseph upon the 
Spanish throne — efforts which had 
resulted in the sudden uprising of 
the Spanish people. In his ardent 
sympathy for their resistance to the 
French despot, Landor had gone to 
Spain in 1808, offered himself as a 
volunteer, sent to the government 
ten thousand reals for the relief of 
the inhabitants of Venturada, a town 
destroyed by the French, and prom- 
ised to equip and lead to the field 
troops up to the number of a thou- 
sand. All this speaks well for Lan- 
dor's generous soul. And while his 
expedition was anything but a success 
from a military standpoint, and while, 
moreover, his evil genius of pride and 
precipitancy managed to make his 
experience uncomfortable by flaring 
up offensively at some harmless ex- 



Landor s Poetry. 79 

pression of Stuart, the English en- 
voy ; still Landor's journey was not 
devoid of results, for the knowledge 
of Spain thus got enabled him to 
impart a local coloring to his drama, 
which, as Southey remarked in con- 
trasting it with his own Spanish epic 
of Roderick, gave Landor an ad- 
vantage. 

The semi-legendary history of 
Spain appears to have excited a 
strong fascination in Landor's mind ; 
and by making choice of that grandly 
tragic story, wherein Count Julian, 
discovering that his daughter has 
been outraged by King Roderick, 
determines to give over his native 
land to the Moors, whom he had 
just before defeated, Landor was able 
to construct a drama, whose charac- 
ters are hewn out, naked and colossal 
as the Prometheus of ^Eschylus. 

By thus objectifying desperate and 
tremendous emotions in imagery so 



80 Walter Savage Landor. 

clear, pregnant, and concise that the 
very words aim to be as distinct and 
real as the deeds they celebrate, 
Landor was following the highest 
Greek models, y£schylusand Sopho- 
cles ; but by reason of this very 
loftiness of purpose, he must needs 
pitch his theme in an ideal key, which 
it was wellnigh impossible for him 
to sustain without, at the same time, 
drowning that modest volume of 
homely human interest requisite to 
the harmony and truth of the whole. 
Hence, if we would justly laud a sub- 
lime picture like that which Count 
Julian draws of himself, when he 
stands in unutterable misery before 
the ruined Roderick — 

" I stand abased before insulting crime, 
I falter like a criminal myself ; 
The hand that hurled thy chariot o'er 

its wheels, 
That held thy steeds erect and motion- 
less, 



Landor s Poetry, 8 1 

As molten statues on some palace gate, 
Shakes as with palsied age before thee 
now, — " 
a picture which Southey declared to 
be " the grandest image of power that 
ever poet produced ; " we must at 
the same time recognize that such 
passages lose much of their force, 
because Landor is ever striving to 
maintain a too continuous level of 
sublimity. He does not grasp the 
magic power inhering in contrast. 
All those wonderful means — a droll 
by-play of wit or humor, a sudden 
dash of pathos — by which a master 
like Shakspeare throws, as it were in 
high, opposed relief, the main action 
of the story, Landor makes little use 
of. And hence, though he tells us 
that he lived with his personages, and 
entered into their sorrows, he never 
quite succeeds in creating a com- 
plete dramatic illusion. As in Sam- 
son Agonistes, the softer human 



82 Walter Savage Landor. 

touches, which should finish the pic- 
ture, are wanting ; and we feel that 
the poet has not attained the end of 
his art, — the striking of a perfect 
mean between the sharply defined 
individual and the vague type, be- 
tween the real and the ideal. But 
perhaps an even stronger reason why 
the human element is not effective 
lies in the absence of a well-sustained 
plot. As Landor conceded, the play 
is really a series of dramatic dialogues, 
several of the scenes even interrupt- 
ing, instead of furthering, the progress 
of the drama. Furthermore, on the 
technical side of the dramatist's art, 
the studied climaxes, the incidental 
explanations, the efforts to arouse a 
sense of mystery, of surprise, or of an- 
ticipation, — all these are more or less 
disregarded. 

But after all abatements have been 
made, it is still true that, in Count 
Julian, Landor had formed a new 



Landors Poetry. 8$ 

and magnificent conception, a con- 
ception partaking less of the subtle 
complexity of the modern drama, 
and more of the simple sublimity of 
the antique tragedians, — and one 
which he sustained with marvellous 
power. De Quincey's words are not 
far above the mark when he says : 
" Mr. Landor, who always rises with 
his subject and dilates like Satan into 
Teneriffe or Atlas, when he sees be- 
fore him an antagonist worthy of his 
powers, is probably the one man in 
Europe that has adequately con- 
ceived the situation, the stern self- 
dependency, and the monumental 
misery of Count Julian. That sub- 
limity of penitential grief, which 
cannot accept consolation from man, 
cannot hear external reproach, can- 
not condescend to notice insult, 
cannot so much as see the curiosity 
of bystanders; that awful careless- 
ness of all but the troubled deeps 



84 Walter Savage Landor. 

within his own heart, and of God's 
spirit brooding upon their surface 
and searching their abysses, never was 
so majestically described." More- 
over, there are, as we have intimated, 
superb passages which show their 
full splendor only when detached and 
read by themselves. Take the first 
scene of the fourth act, or better, 
take the description of Count Julian 
of which De Quincey was thinking 
when he wrote the lines quoted 
above : 

u Not victory that o'ershadows him sees 
he ; 

No airy and light passion stirs abroad, 

To ruffle or to soothe him ; all are 
quelled, 

Beneath a mightier, sterner stress of 
mind : 

Wakeful he sits, and lonely, and un- 
moved, 

Beyond the arrows, views, or shouts 
of men ; 



Landors Poetry. 85 

As oftentimes an eagle, ere the sun 
Throws o'er the varying earth his 

early ray, 
Stands solitary, stands immovable 
Upon some highest cliff, and rolls his 

eye, 
Clear, constant, unobservant, una- 

based, 
In the cold light above the dews of 

morn." 

This surely has Miltonic majesty, 
and yet the movement, as De Quin- 
cey acutely suggested, would have 
been amplified and deepened if Lan- 
dor had placed the line — " Beyond 
the arrows, views, or shouts of men " 
after what are now the closing words 
of the figure, thus making it refer 
directly and more appropriately to 
the eagle, and at the same time 
giving an added depth and impres- 
siveness to the close. Landor here, 
as in several other places, just comes 
short of " the solemn planetary 



86 Walter Savage Landor, 

wheelings " which characterize the 
sustained and involved harmonies of 
Milton's blank verse. 

In order to reach some final de- 
cisions with regard to Landor as a 
dramatist, one is tempted to contrast 
him with the greatest of Italian 
writers of tragedy, Vittorio Alfieri, 
whom he himself always desired to 
resemble. In temperament the two 
men had points in common. Both 
were possessed of inflammable na- 
tures, were on the alert to take 
offence, and thunderous in their an- 
ger. Both had the qualities of the 
school-boy — quick passions, irra- 
tional prejudices, and a somewhat 
immature enthusiasm for liberators 
and abhorrence of kings and tyrants 
— terms which to them were synony- 
mous. There are even superficial 
likenesses. Both were of good 
family ; both lived long in volun- 
tary exile ; both detested the French 



Landors Poetry. 87 

nation. And as dramatists, the two 
had nearly the same ideal, though 
they realized it somewhat differ- 
ently. Abominating the romanti- 
cism which mixes figures and strains 
meanings in the vain effort to allego- 
rize — which mystifies but does not 
enlighten, — they, on the contrary, 
aimed to express in clear and vigor- 
ous words those universal emotions 
which agitate the soul. Their char- 
acters, therefore, are not highly 
complex organisms, like Hamlet or 
Faust, but are rather heroic repre- 
sentations of one or two over-mas- 
tering passions. They come upon 
the stage, say distinctly what they 
feel — in bold, even bald, terms, in 
the case of Alfieri, or in chaste and 
limpid imagery, in the case of Lan- 
dor, — and then they vanish. The 
complicated development of charac- 
ter, which the novelists, especially, 
have delighted to watch, which a 



88 Walter Savage Landor. 

George Eliot has portrayed so won- 
derfully in Tito Melema, is not 
within the range of these students 
of the antique. In Alfieri's plays, 
in particular, there are no subtle 
changes of purpose, no clash of con- 
flicting interests, nothing to retard 
the steady, inevitable, on-moving of 
the plot. As Mr. Howells has re- 
marked of Alfieri's best tragedy : 
" When you read Orestes, you find 
yourself attendant upon an imma- 
nent calamity, which nothing can 
avert or delay. In a solitude like 
that of dreams, those hapless phan- 
tasms, dark types of remorse, of 
cruel ambition, of inexorable re- 
venge, move swiftly to the fatal end. 
They do not grow or develop on 
the imagination ; their character is 
stamped at once, and they have but 
to act it out." This is classicism. 
And it is the ideal of Aifieri and 
Landor. From the aspect of form 



Landors Poetry. 89 

its effects are finer than any that 
romanticism can command. There 
is a purity of outline, an incision of 
idea, which may not tally with the 
exuberance of nature, but which has, 
nevertheless, the invaluable charm of 
distinctness and finish. Such art 
may be selective, and at the same 
time natural. Yet, as we have 
already noticed, this sculptural 
method tends to disregard those 
picturesque backgrounds and beau- 
tiful contrasts and definite local ref- 
erences which are the life of the 
drama. It tends to become as clearly 
outlined as a marble statue, and as 
cold. But what must inevitably 
limit Landor's influence as a drama- 
tist is a defect which he had, but 
which Alfieri, fortunately for his 
fame, had not. Landor was not 
successful in attaining the ideal of 
the best Greek art. He did not duly 
subordinate the parts to the whole. 



90 Walter Savage Landor, 

His plan is ineffective and inade- 
quately sustained. We are fascinated 
by exquisite passages, but it is diffi- 
cult to get a general impression of 
the whole play. The separate parts 
do not bind our interest to the 
development of some central idea. 
And although we may not demand 
of a dramatist an exciting plot, we 
at least demand that he shall stimu- 
late our imagination by suggesting a 
definite goal, and shall all the while 
be gradually leading us toward it. 
Notwithstanding his magnificent 
conception of Count Julian, this 
Landor failed to do, and conse- 
quently Robert Browning was right 
in dedicating his Luria and The 
Soul's Tragedy to Landor, as being 
" a great dramatic poet," rather than 
a great dramatist. 

A great dramatist Landor never 
became, although he composed at 
least five other tragedies and a come- 



Landor s Poetry. 91 

dy. One of the former he seems to 
have written in 181 1 ; but upon 
learning that Longmans refused to 
publish Count Julian, either at their 
own, or even at his expense, Landor 
wrote in great chagrin and exaspera- 
tion to Southey : " On receiving the 
last letter of Mr. Longman I com- 
mitted to the flames my tragedy of 
Ferranti and Giulio, with which I 
intended to surprise you, and am re- 
solved that never verse of mine shall 
be hereafter committed to anything 
else." This storm of indignation, as 
usual, blew over rapidly ; and Count 
Jidian was soon published by Mur- 
ray, though only a few fragments of 
the other tragedy had been saved. 
With the exception of the Charita- 
ble Dowager, a prose comedy, which 
Landor was probably wise in not 
printing, he produced no other com- 
plete drama for years. Count Julian 
and the other two plays mentioned 



92 Walter Savage Landor. 

above were written at Landor's wild, 
beautiful residence, Llanthony Ab- 
bey, in Wales. Subsequently, on 
account of hostilities and financial 
difficulty with tenants and neighbors, 
Landor had been forced to take up 
his abode on the continent — first at 
Tours, then at Como, Pisa, and at 
last at Florence. He had finally, 
through the generous advances of 
Mr. Ablett, aWelsh friend, been able, 
much to his delight, to purchase the 
Villa Gherardescha, an exquisite 
place situated picturesquely on the 
road which ascends from Florence to 
Fiesole. And it was while at Flor- 
ence or at the Villa Gherardescha 
that Landor accomplished his best 
work, the wonderful prose embodied 
in the Imaginary Conversations, the 
Examination of Skakspeare, the 
Pentameron and the Pericles and 
Aspasia. Not, however, until he had 
bid farewell to his beautiful Italian 



Landors Poetry. 93 

home, and had taken up his lonely 
residence at Bath, did he again try 
his hand at tragedy. Here, about 
thirty years after the composition of 
Count Julian he wrote his dramatic 
trilogy, Andrea of Hungary, Giovan- 
71a of Naples, and Fra Rupert, and 
also his Siege of Ancona. Being 
laid up with a sprained ankle, he con- 
ceived and executed the first of these 
dramas in thirteen days, the second 
and third were not long in following. 
Giovanna of Naples, the Italian 
Mary Stuart, who by her tragic sur- 
roundings and fascinating personality 
had excited Landor's chivalrous sus- 
ceptibilities, is the subject of the tril- 
ogy. And it is needless to say that she 
and her several female companions 
are portrayed with that subtle insight 
into all that is gracious and devoted 
in woman's nature, for which Landor 
has been so justly praised. The men 
are not as successfully handled ; yet 



94 Walter Savage Landor, 

the conception of Andrea of Hun- 
gary, the young husband of Giovan- 
na, bears the mark of a true artist's 
workmanship. Andrea shows, what 
is rare in Landor's actors, a real de- 
velopment of character. Brought 
up under the guardianship of a de- 
signing monk, Fra Rupert, he has 
been purposely allowed to remain in 
idleness and ignorance, like Shaks- 
peare's Orlando, but his chivalrous 
soul, under the kind care and com- 
passion of Giovanna, is made to re- 
alize itself, by becoming attuned to 
the chords of love and gratitude. 

In general, these plays — including 
the Siege of Ancona, which in manner 
most resembles Count Julian^ being 
pitched in a similarly heroic strain — 
possess essentially the same merits 
and defects as Landor's earlier dra- 
matic works. On the one hand, 
there is not that effective interaction 
of characters and motives which, 



Landors Poetry. 95 

when regarded from the central idea 
of the play, constitutes a definite, co- 
herent plot. On the other hand, it is 
possible to detach incidents, which, 
supposing ourselves acquainted with 
the merest outline of the story, may 
be viewed as independent imaginary 
conversations, and as such are full of 
power. Thus, for example, the scene 
in the Siege of Ancona, wherein the 
gentle Lady Malaspina, pressing her 
infant to her bosom, laments the 
horrors of the famine, is deeply, nobly 
pathetic. She whispers to her babe : 

" My little one ! 
God will feed thee ! Be sleep thy nour- 

isher 
Until his mercies strengthen me 

afresh ! " 

And when the soldier, with whom she 
was conversing, has hurried away to 
defend the Balista Gate, she looks 
down at the burden in her arms, and 
says: 



g6 Walter Savage Landor. 

" And still thou sleepest, my sweet babe ! 

Is death 
Like sleep ? Ah, who then would fear 

to die ? 
How beautiful is all serenity ! " 

Two priests, passing by, wonder 
whether the child over which the 
woman leans is dead. The one 
thinks not, because she weeps not 
over it ; the other rejoins : 

" For that 
I think it dead. It then could pierce 

no more 
Her tender heart with its sad sobs and 

cries." 

Only a few moments has this "ten- 
der heart" to grieve. The Lady Mala- 
spina, unable to resist the fatal inroads 
of hunger, lies dead ; and the babe 
still peacefully sleeps on her bosom. 

In the same general style as these 
separate scenes from Landor's so- 



Landors Poetry. 97 

called dramas are the innumerable 
short dramatic dialogues, which he 
was in the habit of constructing in 
verse, as well as in prose, throughout 
his life. These animated conversa- 
tions in metrical form are not essen- 
tially different from his prose dia- 
logues of action. The latter are as 
likely to be beautifully idealized as 
the former ; and the only distinction 
between the two classes, is the com- 
paratively superficial one of poetic 
instead of prose expression. It is 
therefore as well to reserve the con- 
sideration of Landor's proficiency in 
this kind of work, until we come to 
notice his Imaginary Conversations. 
Nevertheless, there are one or two of 
these poetic dialogues which for their 
haunting beauty may not be put by. 
One of these is based upon an ima- 
ginary encounter of Menelaus with 
Helen, after the fall of Troy. An- 
other, which Landor afterwards em- 



98 Walter Savage Landor, 

bodied in the Pericles and Aspasia 
relates to the meeting of Agamem- 
non and Iphigeneia among the 
Shades. Of this latter, Landor 
wrote : 

" From eve to morn, from morn to part- 
ing night, 

Father and daughter stood before my 
sight. 

I felt the looks they gave, the words 
they said, 

And reconducted each serener shade. 

Ever shall these to me be well spent 
days, 

Sweet fell the tears upon them, sweet 
the praise ; 

Far from the footstool of the tragic 
throne, 

I am tragedian in this scene alone." 

The dramatic conception of this 
meeting inheres in the peculiar rela- 
tions which subsist between father 
and daughter. Iphigeneia had been 
sacrificed by Agamemnon on the 



Landors Poetry. 99 

outward journey to Troy, in order to 
propitiate the gods ; and Agamem- 
non has just been murdered by his 
adulterous wife, Clytemnestra. Of 
this foul deed, Iphigeneia is pro- 
foundly ignorant, and the interest of 
the daughter in inquiring about the 
living, and especially about her 
mother, and at the same time the 
unexplained grief and anger of Aga- 
memnon, constitute the dramatic 
motive — a potent one. The natu- 
ral criticism, however, to be passed 
upon the scene is, that, while Aga- 
memnon seems gradually to be pre- 
paring his daughter for the revelation 
of his tragic death, he never really 
does tell her. Expectation is ex- 
cited by his exquisitely managed re- 
plies ; but no climax is reached. In 
reading this dialogue the acute criti- 
cism of Chateaubriand with regard 
to the pathetic in poetry comes to 
our mind as especially applicable. 



ioo Walter Savage Landor. 

The condition of father and daugh- 
ter is truly pathetic ; and yet, if our 
tears are excited, it is " by the 
beauty of the poetry" — by our ad- 
miration rather than by our sorrow. 
Who can resist the beauty of these 
lines, especially the Pindaric grand- 
eur of the central ones on Poseidon ; 

" Father ! we must not let you here 

condemn ; 
Not, were the day less joyful : recollect 
We have no wicked here ; no king to 

judge. 
Poseidon, we have heard, with bitter 

rage 
Lashes his foaming steeds against the 

skies, 
And, laughing with loud yell at 

winged fire, 
Innoxious to his fields and palaces, 
Affrights the eagle from the sceptred 

hand ; 
While Pluto, gentlest brother of the 
three, 



Landors Poetry. 101 

And happiest in obedience, views 

sedate 
His tranquil realm, nor envies theirs 

above." 

Not only in his dramatic pieces 
and in his epic has Landor shown 
himself to be a modest master 
of the grand in poetry. Two noble 
odes, one to Regeneration, the other 
to Corinth, at least in places, rise to 
the high-water mark of his poetic 
attainment. The first half of the 
one on Regeneration, which cele- 
brates the awakening to liberty of 
Italy and Greece in the year 1819, is 
thrilling in its enthusiasm. It begins 
with the magnificent lines : 

"We are what suns, and winds, and 
waters make us ; 
The mountains are our sponsors, and 

the rills 
Fashion and win their nursling with 
their smiles." 



102 Walter Savage Landor. 

Certainly no evolutionary phi- 
losopher has ever more grandly 
proclaimed the influence of environ- 
ment! A few lines farther on, 
Landor laments the compromising 
attitude which England has taken 
toward the cause of freedom. 

" Oh thou degenerate Albion ! with 

what shame 
Do I survey thee, pushing forth the 

sponge 
At thy spear's length, in mocking at 

the thirst 
Of holy Freedom in his agony." 

These and others that we might 
quote are fine lines ; yet it must be 
confessed that in this ode, as in 
several other lofty poems, Landor is 
apt to get involved in the meshes of 
a classical reference, and to break 
the thread of passion and poetry in 
explicating his figure. 

Besides all these poetic produc- 



Landor s Poetry. 103 

tions in the grand style, or in a style 
bordering upon the grand, Landor ran 
up and down the gamut of the lighter 
themes of verse. Every passing 
phase of his experience, from the in- 
vitation of a friend to dinner, or the 
celebration of a loved one's charms, 
to the separation from his family, or 
the death of a companion, offers its 
appropriate dash of color to the pic- 
ture of his life. Thus his transient 
moods are wrested from the obliter- 
ating stream of consciousness, and 
preserved in exquisite eidyllia, "carv- 
ings, as it were, on ivory or on gems." 
Many of these are erotic, as, for 
example, those in eulogy of Ianthe, 
a lady whose real name was Sophia 
Jane Swift, and whose person and 
character Landor all his life con- 
tinued to hold in honorable admira- 
tion. What could be nearer to the 
manner of Catullus, and at the same 
time happier, than the following 



104 Walter Savage Landor. 

tribute to this lady's sunny disposi- 
tion : 

" Your pleasures spring like daisies in 

the grass, 

Cut down and up again as blithe as 

ever ; 

From you, Ianthe, little troubles pass, 

Like little ripples in a sunny river." 

Others of these short poems are 
invocations or reminiscences of old 
familiar objects, with little incidents 
now and then interwoven, and a col- 
loquial turn given to the swiftly 
moving iambics. This work partakes 
of the style of Horace. It is Epicu- 
rean in implication, yet at the same 
time healthy and clean. There is a 
naivete in the quick, picturesque 
strokes which is almost irresistible. 
Again, Landor writes addresses to 
his contemporaries, in the way of 
commendation or elegy. There 
are odes to Wordsworth and to 



Landors Poetry. 105 

Southey. In a poem to the latter 
occurs this superb stanza : 

" Alas ! that snows are shed 
Upon thy laurelled head, 
t Hurtled by many cares and many 
wrongs ! 
Malignity lets none 
Approach the Delphic throne ; 
A hundred lane-fed curs bark down 

Fame's hundred tongues. 
But this is in the night when men are slow 
To raise their eyes, when high and low, 
The scarlet and the colorless, are one : 
Soon Sleep unbars his noiseless 

prison, 
And active minds again are risen ; 
Where are the curs ? dream-bound and 
whimpering in the sun." 

In this ode, however, Landor has 
spoiled his climax by not recognizing 
that nature in its pristine excellence 
should be chosen as imagery rather 
than the machinery of literary allu- 



106 Walter Savage Landor. 

sion. Of the elegiac pieces, proba- 
bly the most perfect is the one writ- 
ten to Mary Lamb on the death of 
her brother. The rhyme and rhythm 
of the stanzas accord completely 
with the sentiment ; and the closing 
lines show Landor's classic mode of 
expression, his clear uninvolved 
manner : 

" Behold him ! from the region of the 
blest, 
He speaks : he bids thee rest." 

Lines like these suggest those beau- 
tiful funerary vases, whereon the 
Greeks were wont to figure the 
mourners of the departed, standing 
in simple, touching attitudes, with 
wreathes in their hands. 

It is, however, in the idyl, the last 
form of poetry attempted by Lan- 
dor, that we discover his most dis- 
tinctive poetic contribution. In epic 
and drama, and even in the occa- 



Landor s Poetry. 107 

sional pieces, Landor has been out- 
stripped by poets of deeper passion 
or reflection ; but in his best idyllic 
work he has few, if any, superiors. 
Tennyson and Andre" Ch£nier come 
to our mind as possible competitors. 
Yet the latter had not Landor's 
classic restraint and absolute free- 
dom from romanticism ; and the for- 
mer, in his wonderfully beautiful 
Idyls of the King, illustrates what 
the French critic calls simplesse 
rather than real simplicity. 

A number of these idyls had origi- 
nally appeared in Landor's Idyllia He- 
roica, in Latin, he having continued 
for years to hide away from popular 
appreciation interesting prose and 
verse by reason of his scholarly, and 
at the same time schoolboyish, pref- 
erence for the language of ancient 
Rome over his native tongue. But 
at last, at the request of Lady Bless- 
ington, Landor agreed to translate 



108 Walter Savage Landor. 

these pieces into English. And as 
the outcome we have his Hellenics. 
Of all his poetic achievements, these 
best exhibit what is usually treated 
as the characteristic note of Greek 
art — the note of objectivity. Philo- 
sophically speaking, this epithet, 
when applied to an artist, conveys 
the idea that he has succeeded in 
great measure in detaching his own 
subjective interpretation of an object 
from his observation and portrayal 
of it ; that he has seen and repre- 
sented the thing as it is, without 
trying to suggest any double mean- 
ing, any idea of which the cor- 
responding thing is, in Platonic 
phase, an adumbration. The liquid 
clearness which results from this ob- 
jective treatment is the distinctive 
mark of classicism. And it is in the 
Hellenics that Landor expresses this 
quality pre-eminently. At the same 
time it must not be inferred, con- 



Landors Poetry. 109 

cerning this kind of art, that the 
artist seeks purposely to eliminate 
himself and his ideals from the ob- 
jects of his imagination. It the 
rather arises from an inability or dis- 
inclination on the part of the poet 
to distinguish between nature and 
spirit. As a consequence, he does 
not swathe the body of sensuous 
images, floating on the verge of his 
imagination, in the bands of some 
preconceived order of intellectual- 
ized forms. His soul is a trans- 
parent mirror reflecting a series of 
refined sensations. And he is so 
keenly alive to them, that he is 
ready to believe the very rocks are 
alive too, and share in the universal 
joys of existence. Hence Mr. Forster 
is quite right in saying, that Landor 
reproduces " the time of light, clear, 
definite sensation ; when, to every 
man, the shapes of nature were but 
the reflection of his own ; when 



no Walter Savage Landor. 

marvels were not explained but be- 
lieved, and the supernatural was not 
higher than the natural, or indeed 
other than a different development 
of the attributes and powers of 
nature." 

Among the many fine mythologic 
themes which compose the Hellen- 
ics, the finest, the most delightfully 
objective, is the Hamadryad, a poem 
written in Landor's seventieth year. 
This idyl perused on a fine day in 
summer, in some leafy mountain 
nook, might almost lead the reader, 
his senses being attuned to the gentle 
pulsations of its verse, to fancy that 
he saw, seated there 

" Upon the moss below, with her two 

palms 

Pressing it on each side, a maid in 

form," — 

a veritable Hamadryad. And if his 

mind's eye did not, in the course of 

his reading, bring out a series of the 



Landors Poetry, 1 1 1 

most fascinating little pictures, paint- 
ed in strokes fascinatingly clear and 
delicate, this reader must forsooth be 
of dull wits, a dry literalist, dreamless 
and imaginationless. Indeed, this 
poem of Landor's mature old age is 
above analysis. Each image is struck 
off with an idealized realism and a 
winning yet incisive grace, which 
make common adjectives seem nig- 
gardly. There are little touches of 
characterization, little gnomic ex- 
pressions on the part of the speakers, 
which could not be bettered. What 
could be more naively feminine than 
this: 

" Rhoicos went daily ; but the nymph 

as oft, 
Invisible. To play at love, she knew, 
Stopping its breathings when it 

breathes most soft, 
Is sweeter than to play on any pipe. 
She played on his ; she fed upon his 

sighs ; 



1 1 2 Walter Savage Landor. 

They pleased her when they gently 

waved her hair, 
Cooling the pulses of her purple veins, 
And when her absence brought them 

out, they pleased." 

Even these few lines, however, give 
one an idea of the condensation of 
Landor's style. He is so sparing of 
words that it is not always easy to 
tell what his possessive pronouns 
modify. He is not without faults 
also in his management of blank 
verse : instead of keeping his lines 
relatively entities, he often ends them 
with a preposition or adjective, either 
of which is carelessly related to a 
noun in the succeeding line. Not- 
withstanding this, many of the Hel- 
lenics are typical examples of that 
form of poetry which is of the senses, 
and is yet pure, clean, and beautiful. 
Fitly to close our review of the 
idyllic poems, and of Landor's poe- 
try in general, we shall quote a few 



Landors Poetry. 1 1 3 

lines from the Fiesolan Idyl, which 
will bring before us our author him- 
self, giving us a glimpse of the gen- 
tler side of his nature — the side which, 
in contrasting it with Landor's ve- 
hement outbursts of temper, Leigh 
Hunt likened to such a contradiction 
in nature as the blossoming of lilies 
from a stormy mountain pine. The 
close of this poem is open to quota- 
tion for its delicate, psychological 
perception ; but it is the central 
lines, which tell of Landor's love of 
flowers, that we especially desire to 
transcribe. 

" And 't is and ever was my wish and way 
To let all flowers live freely, and all die 
(Whene'er their genius bids their souls 

depart) 
Among their kindred in their native 

place. 
I never pluck the rose ; the violet's head 
Hath shaken with my breath upon its 

bank 



ii4 Walter Savage Landor. 

And not reproached me ; the ever 

sacred cup 
Of the pure lily hath, between my 

hands, 
Felt safe, unsoiled, nor lost one grain of 

gold." 

And now with these lines still be- 
fore us as fair specimens of what 
Landor could do in the way of verse, 
we come to ask ourselves, What in 
general are the elements of power in 
his poetry ? He himself has given a 
touchstone by which to test his own 
performance. " What is there in 
poetry," he makes Boccaccio say, 
" unless there be moderation and 
composure ? are they not better than 
the hot, uncontrollable harlotry of a 
flaunting, dishevelled enthusiasm ? 
Whoever has the power of creating, 
has likewise the inferior power of 
keeping his creations in order. The 
best poets are the most impressive, 
because their steps are regular ; for 



Landors Poetry, 115 

without regularity there is neither 
strength nor state." And again, he 
puts in the mouth of Aspasia the 
following : " For any high or any 
wide operation, a poet must be en- 
dued, not with passion indeed, but 
with the power and mastery over it." 
Now it is acknowledged that Lan- 
dor's effort after moderation and 
composure, and the regularity which 
should result from them, has its frui- 
tion in his poetry. He was able to 
strike off ideas in a singularly vivid, 
imaginative way, without burdening 
them with accessory touches, which 
would obscure their meaning. Doubt- 
less he has also the power and mas- 
tery over passion — when the passion 
is there ! but his very fault consists 
in a lack of that tense enthusiasm 
and sweeping passion, which are the 
attributes of great poets. His ideal 
was more like that of Wordsworth, 
" emotion remembered in tranquil- 



1 1 6 Walter Savage Landor. 

lity "; but then he was not endowed 
with the the deeply reflective percep- 
tion which constitutes the glory of 
Wordsworth. Landor has too little 
of the transcendentalist about him, 
too little of the insight that pene- 
trates below the show of things, to 
possess the power of entering into 
the inner life of nature and thought. 
This very fact must forever exclude 
him from a place among the poets of 
the front rank. He may have had 
a modest share of what Matthew 
Arnold calls "natural magic" ; but, 
barring the really sublime conception 
of Count Julian, he was practically 
devoid of " moral profundity." Hence 
his position and influence as a poet, 
like that of the aesthetic school of 
Mr. Swinburne and his compeers— 
who in a sense recognize themselves 
as Landor's disciples, — must always 
remain circumscribed. As Heinrich 
Heine once said : " Deeds are the off- 



Landors Poetry. 117 

spring of words ; but Goethe's pretty 
words are childless. That is the 
curse upon what has originated in 
mere art." And that is the curse 
which falls upon much of Landor's 
poetry. 



III. 

LANDOR'S PROSE WRITINGS. 



119 



III. 

LANDOR'S PROSE WRITINGS. 

Falling in with the universal im- 
pulse of our day, the tendency to 
trace derivations, we would find it 
interesting, were it possible, to study 
the development of Landor's prose. 
Certainly a style of such singular ex- 
cellence could not have been reached 
without many tentative efforts. In- 
deed Forster has preserved to us in 
his Biography a letter of Landor's to 
Dr. Parr which shows the stilted 
manner of eighteenth-century " epis- 
tolary correspondence," and which is 
of course in marked contrast to the 
sanity and naturalness which Landor 
attained in his published prose. 

121 



122 Walter Savage Landor. 



■& 



The letter begins : " I am rejoiced to 
find that you have not forgotten me, 
and I raise myself up from the bosom 
of indifference to the voice and the 
blandishments of praise." We look 
in vain for such bombast in Landor's 
later writing, though all through his 
life we find him inclined to slip into 
a mode of expression which is de- 
clamatory and somewhat Johnson- 
ese. An actual descent into the false 
sublime, however, is restricted to the 
political dialogues and pamphlets, 
which he ever and anon felt con- 
strained to cast upon the troubled 
waters of civil contention. These, 
so far as we are acquainted with 
them, are worthy of his prejudices 
rather than his powers. Yet it should 
be said that one often runs across 
sentences, in the midst of diatribes 
against priests and kings, which for 
rhetorical splendor are unsurpassed 
and unsurpassable. And it must 



Landors Prose Writings. 123 

also be said that Landor's opposition 
to war, and enthusiasm for freedom 
justly challenge our admiration and 
adherence — at least in their general 
conception, if not in their Landorian 
applications. 

Omitting the consideration of Lan- 
dor's political writings, and of his 
pleas for spelling-reform, which were 
generally unheeded; of his occasional 
essays in criticism, which, with the 
exception of three refined textual 
studies of Theocritus, Catullus, and 
Petrarch, have not come down to us ; 
and of his Latin works, which we 
would scarcely have the temerity to 
criticise, even were they perfectly 
preserved,— we have remaining four 
great monuments in prose, the 
Imaginary Conversations, the Citation 
and Examination of William Shak- 
speare, the Pentameron, and the Peri- 
cles and Aspasia. 

It was after Landor had gotten 



124 Walter Savage Landor. 

comfortably established in Italy that 
he wrote, between the years 1821 
and 1829, the major part of the first 
of these works. His inclination had 
always been toward this mode of ex- 
pression. Twenty years before, he 
had offered to the Morning Chronicle, 
the organ of the Whigs, among whom 
he then counted himself an unbiassed 
exponent, a dialogue between Burke 
and Grenville. This had not been 
accepted, and he does not appear, to 
have made many more attempts at 
this kind of writing until after he had 
taken up his abode in Florence in 
the fall of 1 82 1. Landor's concrete 
way of looking at things, his ready 
enthusiasm for persons embodying 
certain sentiments and ideas, rather 
than for the abstract, logical presenta- 
tion of these ideas and sentiments, 
made the dialogue his natural literary 
element. He was almost as much of 
a hero-worshipper as Carlyle. The 



Landors Prose Writings. 125 

Hegelian conception of a collective, 
or rather of an organic, humanity 
advancing from age to age, at one 
time with halting step, at another 
with assurance and courage, toward 
the more perfect realization of the 
divine idea, would have seemed to 
him but a mystical ideal for one to 
set before all thoughtful men as the 
goal toward which they must strive, 
yea, even agonize. It would indeed 
have been well if the following mag- 
nificent words written by Mazzini 
had been pondered by these intense 
individualists, Carlyle and Landor : 
" There is something greater, more 
divinely mysterious, than all the 
great men — and that is the human 
race which includes them, thethought 
of God which stirs within them, and 
which the whole human race collec- 
tively can alone accomplish. Disown 
not, then, the common mother for 
the sake of certain of her children, 



126 Walter Savage Landor. 

however privileged they may be ; for 
at the same time that you disown 
her, you will lose the true compre- 
hension of these rare men whom you 
admire. . . . The inspiration of 
genius belongs one half to heaven, 
the other to the crowd of common 
mortals from whose life it springs." 
Such a conception of the solidarity 
and interconnection of the race, 
coupled with the idea of a God in 
and at the same time above hu- 
manity, might well arouse our aspira- 
tions and our efforts. And it is far 
removed from the Comtean view 
which, instead of recognizing God as 
working in humanity and yet above 
it, identifies, by a debasing anthro- 
pomorphism, the idea of Deity with 
the notion of collective man, and 
thus gives the sanction of divin- 
ity to mere numbers ; whereas it is 
indeed difficult to see how, if indi- 
vidual man be not God-born, hu- 



Landors Prose Writings. 127 

manity, or collective man, can possess 
this attribute. The whole cannot be 
different from its parts ; and if the 
individual be without God in the 
world, even so must be the race. 
These high ideas, however, were not 
within Landor's range of thought. 
An admiration for individual traits 
was the mainspring in his theory of 
life. He quotes enthusiastically, in 
one of his letters, the following lines 
from the Life of Blanco White, which 
adequately sum up his own philoso- 
phy : " The moral world presents 
upon the whole a most hideous and 
distorted appearance. But it hap- 
pens here, as in some pictures. 
Looked at with the naked eye, they 
are a perfect mass of confusion ; 
but the moment you look through 
a lens constructed to unite the 
scattered lines in a proper focus, 
they show a regularity, and even 
beauty. My favorite lens is a vir- 



128 Walter Savage Landor, 

tuous man ; it brings into harmony 
the discordant parts of the moral 
world." 

For the representation, in imagi- 
nary conversations, of the virtuous 
and the wise of the past, Landor was, 
moreover, especially fitted by his 
general intellectual make-up. In- 
consecutiveness, which in other forms 
of prose would be counted a fault, is 
unobjectionable in the dialogue, if 
kept within the large, embracing 
unity of a central thought. And the 
opportunity, by virtue of the free- 
dom and informality of conversation, 
to give vent to extravagant ideas 
peculiar to the author is likewise 
made possible. This is a concession 
important to a writer possessed of 
Landor's impetuous individuality. 
So that, when speaking in the person 
of another, he could in reality ex- 
press his own idiosyncrasies more 
freely than if he had chosen to write 



Landors Prose Writings. 129 

in propria persona through the 
medium of essay or treatise. 

Landor availed himself of this 
license even to the choice of sub- 
jects, taking his characters indiscrim- 
inately from many nationalities and 
many ages; so that it is not easy to 
establish a classification of the dia- 
logues, with the divisions complete 
and mutually exclusive. The best 
arrangement that has been suggested 
is by Mr. Colvin, who distinguishes 
between the dramatic and the non- 
dramatic conversations. This is cer- 
tainly a philosophic demarcation, and 
one which can be applied with some 
degree of exactitude. We would, 
however, prefer to employ the posi- 
tive terms, reflective and dramatic, 
in discriminating between the two 
classes. 

The dialogues of reflection are 
usually long, not always easy to 
read through without weariness, yet 



130 Walter Savage Landor, 

abound in original and penetrating 
aphorisms couched in strikingly beau- 
tiful imagery. There are, however, 
two vital defects in the reflective class, 
which, if they do not lower the high 
value of selections from the conver- 
sations, do certainly modify our ap- 
preciation of them as wholes. The 
first of these defects may be seen 
by contrasting Landor with Plato. 
Emerson truly says: "Plato turns 
incessantly the obverse and the 
reverse of the medal of Jove." 
By this he primarily meant that Plato 
had the abstract speculative genius 
of the Oriental coupled with the love 
of the accomplished fact which char- 
acterizes our Western mind ; but he 
also meant to infer that in the dia- 
logues Plato saw both sides of a 
question, so that his speakers could 
always give the cons as well as the 
pros. This versatility Landor's char- 
acters do not possess. Our author 



Landors Prose Writings, 131 

is not proficient in the play of re- 
partee, which really constitutes the 
life of the dialogue. Timotheus or 
Calvin are the mere targets at which 
Lucian or Melancthon level their 
controversial guns. And the poor 
targets become thoroughly riddled 
before the conversations are over. 
The sense of friction, of clash, which 
should sustain our flagging interest, 
is conspicuously absent. And, conse- 
quently, our wits are not aroused to 
a fascinated play of thought, and 
our attention begins to wane. 

The other defect, which is fully as 
serious, arises from the lack of or- 
ganic unity in the several conversa- 
tions. We do not, of course, mean 
that Landor should have analytically 
plotted out a dialogue, as one would 
divide a treatise, making the various 
parts depend explicitly and obviously 
upon some central conception. Such 
a design would have stopped the flow 



132 Walter Savage Landor, 

of imagination, and have rendered 
the speeches stilted and unreal. But 
we do mean that Landor should 
himself have known whither he was 
leading us, and that the meandering 
paths of thought should have at last 
opened out upon some central pros- 
pect, whence we might look down 
and discover the way we had come. 
Landor should have recognized that 
a vast body of aphorisms and fine 
thoughts, and also, it must be ac- 
knowledged, of tedious disquisitions, 
must collapse into an incoherent 
mass if they be not sustained by the 
skeleton of an underlying idea. That 
he did not recognize this fact is seen 
from his own figurative account of 
his mode of composing the dialogues. 
" I confess to you," he says, " that a 
few detached thoughts and images 
have always been the beginnings of 
my works. Narrow slips have risen 
up, more or fewer, above the sur- 



Landors Prose Writings. 133 

face. These gradually became larger 
and more consolidated ; freshness 
and verdure first covered one part, 
then another; then plants of firmer 
and higher growth, however scantily, 
took their places, then extended 
their roots and branches; and among 
them, and around about them, in a 
little while you yourself, and as many 
more as I desired, found places for 
study and recreation." Thus, instead 
of constructing each of these conver- 
sations after the model of a tree, Lan- 
dor has chosen to make each repre- 
sent a whole tangled forest of oaks 
and underbrush. A true dialogue, 
like a true poem, should contain 
within itself, not openly, but in im- 
plication, a thoroughly thought-out 
plan. This Landor failed to see, 
and hence fell short of the ideal 
requirements. 

But after we have made all our ad- 
missions, it must still be allowed that 



134 Walter Savage Landor. 

these conversations contain — as Lan- 
dor himself declared, when his exas- 
peration was excited by difficulties in 
publishing them — " as forcible writ- 
ing as exists on earth." Not only- 
are they forcible ; many of them are 
pervaded by a spirit of beauty that is 
rarely attained. Take the dialogue 
between Epicurus and his two lovely 
pupils, Leontion and Ternissa. The 
Epicureanism, which would environ 
us amid delightful sights and sounds 
and would thus gently withdraw 
our souls away from the din of the 
crowd into the peace of self-culture 
and self-satisfaction, was never more 
alluringly set forth. " Oh, sweet 
sea-air! how bland art thou, and 
refreshing ! breathe upon Leontion ! 
breathe upon Ternissa ! bring them 
health and spirits and serenity, many 
springs and many summers, and when 
the vine-leaves have reddened and 
rustle under their feet. These, my 



Landors Prose Writings, 135 

beloved girls, are the children of 
Eternity. They played around The- 
seus and the beauteous Amazon; they 
gave to Pallas the bloom of Venus, 
and to Venus the animation of Pal- 
las. Is it not better to enjoy by the 
hour their soft salubrious influence, 
than to catch by fits the rancid breath 
of demagogues ; than to swell and 
move under it without or against our 
will ; than to acquire the semblance 
of eloquence by the bitterness of 
passion, the tone of philosophy by 
disappointment, or the credit of 
prudence by distrust? Can fortune, 
can industry, can desert itself, bestow 
on us anything we have not here? " 

Again, take the conversation be- 
tween Vittoria Colonna and Michael 
Angelo, wherein they discuss the 
qualities of poetry and the glory of 
the Greeks. How acute and true 
are the following aphorisms : " The 
beautiful in itself is useful by awak- 



136 Walter Savage Landor. 

ening our finer sensibilities, which it 
must be our own fault if we do not 
carry with us into action." — " Wishes 
are by-paths on the declivity to un- 
happiness ; the weaker terminate in 
the sterile sand, the stronger in 
the vale of tears." — " Serenity is no 
sign of security. A stream is never 
so smooth, equable, and silvery, as at 
the instant before it becomes a cata- 
ract. The children of Niobe fell by 
the arrows of Diana under a bright 
and cloudless sky." — " Little minds 
in high places are the worst impedi- 
ments to great. Chestnuts and es- 
culent oaks permit the traveller to 
pass onward under them ; briars and 
thorns and unthrifty grass entangle 
him." The last two quotations give 
the mechanism of Landor's prose — 
first the simple statement of an idea, 
then a metaphor illustrative of it. 

Two of the most suggestive of the 
reflective dialogues have already 



Landors Prose Writings. 137 

been mentioned in another connec- 
tion, those between Lucian and 
Timotheus, and Calvin and Melanc- 
thon. These illustrate what we have 
called Landor's religious positivism. 
In the former, the pagan satirist, 
who is Landor himself in thin dis- 
guise, gets the better of his cousin, 
the Christian Timotheus, and in the 
course of the argument gives expres- 
sion to this characteristic remark : 
11 We are upon earth to learn what 
can be learnt upon earth, and not to 
speculate on what never can be . . . 
Let men learn what benefits men ; 
above all things, to contract their 
wishes, to calm their passions, and, 
more especially, to dispel their fears. 
Now they are to be dispelled, not by 
collecting clouds, but by piercing 
and scattering them. In the dark 
we may imagine depths and heights 
immeasurable, which, if a torch be 
carried right before us, we find it 



138 Walter Savage Landor. 

easy to leap across. Much of what 
we call sublime is only the residue of 
infancy, and the worst of it." It is 
curious that Kant is reported to 
have expressed the same idea as is 
contained in the last two sentences, 
in reference to the poetry of Isaiah 
and Ossian. Both men, as rational- 
ists, were constitutionally unable to 
realize that the profound synthetic 
intuitions of the poet are sublime, 
not because of an obscurity which 
is incident to human limitations, but 
by reason of the divine hints, which 
these intuitions contain, of higher 
spiritual altitudes and loftier issues 
than man had before dreamed of. 

In the discussion between Calvin 
and Melancthon, the former is as 
clay in the hands of his humanita- 
rian opponent. This is surely an 
unfair representation of the acknowl- 
edged logical acumen of the great 
Genevan theologian. Nevertheless, 



Landors Prose Writings, 139 

Melancthon enunciates several senti- 
ments which it would have been well 
if Calvin and some of his theological 
successors had thoughtfully heeded. 
Thus he says, somewhat after the 
manner of Emerson or Matthew Ar- 
nold : " What a curse hath metaphor 
been to religion ! It is the wedge 
that holds asunder the two great 
portions of the Christian world. We 
hear of nothing so commonly as fire 
and sword. And here, indeed, what 
was metaphor is converted into sub- 
stance and applied to practice." 
Again, he says : " I remember no 
discussion on religion in which reli- 
gion was not a sufferer by it, if 
mutual forbearance and belief in an- 
other's good motives and intentions 
are (as I must always think they are) 
its proper and necessary appurte- 
nances." How identical this senti- 
ment is with the life and thought of 
our great American teacher, Emer- 



140 Walter Savage Landor. 

son ! And again, near the close 
of the dialogue, Melancthon makes 
some searching remarks concern- 
ing idolatry, discussing it very much 
as a Greek philosopher would, and 
at last uttering this humanitarian 
principle : " But in regard to idola- 
try, I see more criminals that are 
guilty of it than you do. I go below 
the stone-quarry and the pasture, be- 
yond the graven image and the ox- 
stall. If we bow before the distant 
image of good, while there exists 
within our reach one solitary object 
of substantial sorrow, which sorrow 
our efforts can remove, we are guilty 
(I pronounce it) of idolatry. We pre- 
fer the intangible effigy to the living 
form. Surely we neglect the service 
of our Maker if we neglect his chil- 
dren." This religion of kindly 
common-sense is again expounded by 
William Penn in his dialogue with 
Lord Peterborough, who represents 



Landor s Prose Writings, 141 

the aristocrat with ideals out of joint 
with the actual condition of the 
aristocracy. Landor is here able 
to give voice to his oft repeated 
disgust for a democracy, which must 
needs be devoid of nobility and dis- 
tinction. Landor thoroughly con- 
curred in Pascal's saying : " A mesure 
quon a plus d' esprit on trouve quit 
y a plus d'hommes originaux, Les 
gens du commun ne trouvent pas de 
difference entre les homines." 

Without taking the space to dilate 
upon the fine old Roman dignity 
which permeates the dialogues be- 
tween Lucullus and Caesar, and 
Cicero and his brother, we must 
select finally, as bringing out an 
element in Landor's character, the 
conversations between Chesterfield 
and Chatham, and Diogenes and 
Plato, both of these having for their 
object to exhibit the last-named 
philosopher in a light decidedly un- 



142 Walter Savage Landor. 

favorable to his reputation. As Mr. 
Colvin has pointed out, Landor had 
spent weeks in strenuously reading 
all the Platonic dialogues in the 
original. This examination must 
have been somewhat perfunctory ; 
and partly as the result of it, Landor 
conceived an invincible dislike for 
what he held to be the " bodiless in- 
comprehensible vagaries " and the 
falsely ornate style of Plato ; there- 
fore he makes this philosopher 
appear as a ridiculous milksop of a 
sophist in the presence of his gruff 
contemporary of the Tub ; and even 
when Plato indulges in a fine figure 
like this, " The brightest of stars 
appear the most unsteady and trem- 
ulous in their light, not from any 
quality inherent in themselves, but 
from the vapors that float below, and 
from the imperfection of vision in 
the surveyor," Diogenes roughly 
retorts, " Draw thy robe around 



Landors Prose Writings. 143 

thee ; let the folds fall gracefully, 
and look majestic. That sentence is 
an admirable one ; but not for me. 
I want sense, not stars." Diogenes 
here gives, more or less truly, Lan- 
dor's real thought concerning Plato, 
and concerning even the faintest 
tincture of so-called mysticism. This 
attitude toward the Greek thinker 
shows, characteristically, an obvious 
limitation in Landor's intelligence. 
His mind clung only too tenaciously 
to the tangible ; and speculative in- 
sight, the power of drawing the uni- 
versal out of its investiture in par- 
ticulars, he therefore undervalued, 
designating its products by some 
such opprobrious epithets as " bodi- 
less incomprehensible vagaries." In 
this, Landor is another example 
of the tendency to depreciate that 
particular faculty which one does 
not happen to possess. 

While the dialogues of reflection 



144 Walter Savage Landor. 

are thus somewhat too heavily 
freighted with Landor's idiosyn- 
crasies, and are likewise open to the 
two general defects of being one- 
sided in opinion and deficient in 
organic unity, the dialogues of ac- 
tion are amenable to none of these 
objections, but are scenes transcribed 
from the drama of history with as 
masterful a hand as any within the 
range of classical literature. These 
dialogues are especially and justly 
noted for their delicate insight into 
womanhood. In a letter to Southey 
Landor makes us aware of the source 
of this power. " I delight," he says, 
" in the minute variations and almost 
imperceptible shades of the female 
character, and confess that my rev- 
eries, from my most early youth, 
were almost entirely on what this 
one or that one would have said or 
done in this or that situation. Their 
countenances, their movements, their 



Landors Prose Writings. 145 

forms, the colors of their dresses, 
were before my eyes." In the con- 
crete realization of these reveries in 
such personages as Anne Boleyn, 
Lady Lisle, Jeanne D'Arc, Vipsania, 
and Godiva, the original glow of his 
imagination shines with undiminished 
brightness and beauty. 

Thus, the unfortunates, Vipsania 
and Anne Boleyn, in their womanly 
patience and innocency stand in 
touching contrast to their husbands, 
the weak-willed Tiberius and the 
brutal Henry. Another attractive 
female character is Rhodope, who 
tells to her fellow-slave, ^Esop, the 
story of a famine during which her 
father was forced to sell her into 
slavery. Parts of this dialogue are 
in Landor's best style. Yet it is 
always true of him that in narratives 
introduced in the midst of the con- 
versation he is apt to grow tedious 
and to violate probability. Thus, 



146 Walter Savage Landor. 

Rhodope, though only five years of 
age when the famine occurred, and 
now only fourteen, recalls the details 
connected with it as if she had been 
a grown woman. Her memory of 
the incidents is more than preco- 
cious, it is prematurely old ; and she 
reminds us of one of those diminu- 
tive adults that are represented by 
early sculptors in default of children. 
Thus a child of five years has the 
sagacity to know the estimation in 
which her " father had always been 
held by his fellow-citizens," and the 
precocity to pinch his ear, as a play- 
ful way of arousing his anger against 
one of his friends. Nor can we de- 
fend this unreality by supposing that 
Rhodope's present developed per- 
sonality colors the memory of her 
past experience, since even at the 
time of her relating the story she is 
a mere girl of fourteen. 

A more successful dialogue, and 



Landors Prose Writings. 147 

one which gives us a glimpse of the 
sweetest, purest, and most compas- 
sionate of all Landor's women, is that 
between the Lady Godiva and her 
husband, Earl Leofric. It would be 
hard to find in literature a more beau- 
tiful and touching conception than 
that of the tender-hearted Lady Godi- 
va, pleading with all the enticements 
of love and all the power of an angel, 
that thus she may prevail upon her 
obdurate lord to remit the tax, which 
his starving tenants are unable to 
pay, even after the utmost self-de- 
denial. Thus, when Leofric declares 
that the tax must be paid, else solemn 
festivals cannot be held, Godiva re- 
joins : " Is the clamorousness that 
succeeds the death of God's dumb 
creatures, are crowded halls, are 
slaughtered cattle, festivals? are 
maddening songs and giddy dances, 
and hireling praises from party-col- 
ored coats? Can the voice of a 



148 Walter Savage Landor. 

minstrel tell us better things of 
ourselves than our own internal one 
might tell us ? or can his breath 
make our breath softer in sleep ? 
Oh my beloved ! let everything be a 
joyance to us ; it will, if we will. 
Sad is the day, and worse must fol- 
low, when we hear the blackbird in 
the garden and do not throb with 
joy. But, Leofric, the high festival 
is strown by the servant of God upon 
the heart of man. It is gladness, it 
is thanksgiving ; it is the orphan, 
the starveling, pressed to the bosom, 
and bidden, as its first command- 
ment, to remember its benefactor. 
We will hold this festival, the guests 
are ready. We may keep it up for 
weeks, and months, and years to- 
gether, and always be the happier 
and richer for it. The beverage of 
this feast, O Leofric, is sweeter than 
bee or flower or vine can give us: 
it flows from heaven ; and in heaven 



Landors Prose Writings, 149 

will it abundantly be poured out 
again, to him who pours it out here 
unsparingly." The angelic spirit 
with which the lady nerves herself 
to obey the cruel requirement which 
her spouse, partly in jest and partly 
in vexation, had laid upon her, that 
he might thus induce her to desist 
from the request, is a fit climax to 
this most perfect of the conversa- 
tions. 

Dialogues very different from these 
and from each other, are the ones 
between Metellus and Marius, and 
Peter the Great and his son Alexis. 
Each illustrates a phase of Landor's 
talent. The former with its stupen- 
dous conception of " the civic fire " 
portrays the insatiable spirit of Ro- 
man conquest ; the latter, Landor's 
harsh, rugged manner in his satires. 
It was impossible for him to condone 
what is base or cruel, so that his 
satire resembles Juvenal's or Swift's, 



1 50 Walter Savage Landor. 

more than Horace's or Thackeray's. 
He aims to be extravagant and 
crushing rather than mildly derisive, 
and distorts the facts, not mockingly, 
bat with a profound sense of anger 
for outraged justice. 

As showing another feature of 
Landor's talent, namely, the way in 
which he took the bare intimations 
of history and clothed them by the 
power of a suggestive, sympathetic 
imagination, we might instance the 
dialogue between the Earl of Essex 
and Edmund Spenser. Probably 
the only historic material for this 
finely conceived scene is to be found 
in the following statement of Ben 
Jonson, as reported by his literary 
compeer, Drummond of Hawthorn- 
den : " The Irish having rob'd Spen- 
ser's goods, and burnt his house and 
a little child new-born, he and his 
wife escaped ; and after, he died for 
lake of bread, in King street, and re- 



Landor' s Prose Writings. 151 

fused 20 pieces sent to him by my 
Lord of Essex, and said he was sorrie 
he had no time to spend them." 
Landor used to say of himself : " I 
am a horrible, confounder of histori- 
cal facts ; I have usually one history 
that I have read, and another that I 
have invented." The truth of the 
acknowledgment is seen in this 
dialogue, whose dramatic motive, as 
invented by Landor, lies in Essex's 
ignorance of the reason for the poet's 
grief, and in the gradual revelation 
of its cause, and in the exquisite tact 
and kindness with which the Earl 
seeks to lighten the grievous burden 
of his unfortunate friend. Another 
dialogue even more pathetic, and one, 
moreover, which rises to the very 
summit of sublimity, is that between 
Lady Lisle and Elizabeth Gaunt. 
The humility and complete self- 
abnegation shown by these heroic 
souls are conceived with loving fidel- 



152 Walter Savage Landor. 

ity ; and the depth of Christian feel- 
ing displayed makes us almost wil- 
ling- to take back the assertion, made 
in treating of Landor as a man of 
letters, that the Christian ideal of 
self-sacrifice was foreign to his na- 
ture. In such dialogues as this, one 
realizes that if Landor did not follow 
the exact facts of the past, he so 
transfused and irradiated the spirit 
of history as to render the notice of 
his departure from minute accuracy 
unessential and ill-timed. 

The style of these dialogues of ac- 
tion is as interesting a study as their 
subject-matter. In them, Landor 
often carries his tendency to conden- 
sation of phrase and thought to an 
extreme. He gives no stage direc- 
tions, and we have constantly to im- 
agine what the actors are doing, in 
order that we may catch the thread 
of their intercourse. Thus, we must 
picture Godiva, as having dismounted 



Landors Prose Writings. 153 

and as kneeling by the side of the 
road, petitioning Leofric's mercy 
toward his vassals ; when suddenly he 
exclaims : " Here comes the bishop : 
we are but one mile from the walls. 
Why dismountest thou ? No bishop 
can expect it. Godiva ! my honor 
and my rank among men are hum- 
bled by this : Earl Godwin will hear 
of it. Up ! up ! the bishop hath seen 
it ; he urgeth his horse onward. Dost 
thou not hear him now upon the 
solid turf behind thee?" At times, 
this mode of indirectly incorporating 
what are really stage directions, into 
the dialogue, gives us an unpleasant 
jar ; because we feel that one actor 
is describing to the other what must 
be already patent to both, and that 
this is done merely for the sake of 
making the situation plain to the 
audience. 

Another peculiarity is the main- 
tenance of sober and regularly con- 



154 Walter Savage Landor. 

structed sentences even in the midst 
of the highest excitement and passion. 
This tendency, already noted, leads 
to a peculiar psychological effect 
upon the reader. It makes him more 
directly moved by the attractive 
management of the situation than by 
its inherent pathos or sublimity. 
Our critical appreciation is never 
held in abeyance. Hence the quali- 
ties of Landor's work appeal to us 
more as artists than simply as men. 
We always remain conscious of its 
technical finish. The emotions ex- 
perienced by the character, while 
conceived with all fidelity, yet their 
expression being sober and regular, 
and not, as in life, harsh and dis- 
jointed, the scene is removed a step 
from the actual, and we are unable 
to enter spontaneously into the rush 
of feeling, but must admire while 
keeping relatively unmoved. These 
facts explain why Landor, like Ed- 



Landors Prose Writings. 155 

mund Spenser, may be called "a 
writer's writer." 

If this epithet might be applied to 
the author of the Imaginary Conver- 
sations, — typical specimens of which, 
we have tried to select from among 
the one hundred and forty-seven 
dialogues, — much more is it applica- 
ble to one who wrote the Citation 
and Examination of William Shak- 
speare before the Worshipful Sir 
Thomas Lucy, Knight, touching Deer- 
stealing. This amplified conversa- 
tion Landor composed while at his 
beautiful Italian home, the Villa 
Gherardescha, where he lived from 
1829 to 1837, and where he also 
wrote the Pericles and Aspasia, and a 
part of the Pentameron. The Exam, 
ination, which is an elaborate essay 
at humor conveyed in the heavily 
loaded style of Elizabethan prose, is 
the least happy of all Landor's longer 
writings. He himself expressed some 



156 Walter Savage Landor, 

doubts as to whether his humor 
would seem humorous — doubts 
which were amply sustained by the 
result. The attempt to retain evan- 
escent flashes of wit within a 
euphuistic style laden with formali- 
ties and circumlocutions is as though 
one should try to spirit about a 
bludgeon as if it were a rapier. Wit 
and humor of this description tend to 
become ponderous and depressing • 
and this is just what Landor's 
efforts at the facetious actually are. 
One easily recognizes other defects. 
The freedom of epithet and of refer- 
ence, not to say the indecency of an 
occasional remark, particularly one 
from Sir Silas, may be characteristic 
of Elizabethan literature, but fortu- 
nately is not of Victorian. Indeed, 
Landor has reproduced this element 
with more historic accuracy than he 
has some others worthier of reproduc- 
tion. Thus, for example, the verses 



Landors Prose Writings. 157 

discovered in the culprit's pocket are 
much more Landorian than Shak- 
spearian. And Shakspeare himself, 
in the person of a decidedly pert 
young man, would hardly lead one 
to infer the presence of a universal 
genius. 

The grandiloquent knight, who 
prides himself upon his gentle birth 
and his knowledge of poetry and 
theology, and his malicious chaplain, 
Master Silas Gough, who entertains 
designs upon Shakspeare's sweet- 
heart, Anne Hathaway, are more 
happily conceived, in a vein of humor 
somewhere between mere exaggera- 
tion and caricature. And the clever 
sayings which the former sometimes 
throws out to his dependants, as well 
as the weighty words which Shak- 
speare is made to quote from Dr. 
Glaston, an Oxford preacher, are 
well worth digging out and scrutiniz- 
ing. The entire narrative of the 



158 Walter Savage Landor. 

pathetic fate of the young poet, John 
Wellerby, which Shakspeare is sup- 
posed to have heard from Dr. Glaston, 
is permeated with an ideal beauty, 
making it by far the finest passage in 
this disappointing book. 

The Pentameron, another conversa- 
tion elaborated into a small volume, 
is much more successful both in choice 
of subject and in treatment. It pur- 
ports to be five interviews, held on 
five successive days, between Boc- 
caccio, who is ill, and his sympathetic 
friend, Petrarch, who has come to 
visit him. The title and idea of the 
book are of course taken from Boc- 
caccio's Decameron, which always ap- 
pealed to Landor, doubtless above 
its actual value. Boccaccio's honest 
and lusty, if sometimes coarse, real- 
ism, his hearty grasp upon certain 
types of character, his power as a 
story-teller — all aroused Landor's 
admiration. And moreover, on the 



Landors Prose Writings, 159 

very grounds about the villa where 
Landor lived lay the Valley of La- 
dies, described in the Decameron ; 
and, as Forster says, from Landor's 
" gate up to the gates of Florence 
there was hardly a street or farm 
that the great story-teller had not 
associated with some witty or affect- 
ing narrative." Such scenes were 
naturally calculated to quicken Lan- 
dor's imagination, and to intensify 
his interest in Boccaccio. 

It were useless in examining a 
book as delightful as this, some of 
whose pages, as Mrs. Browning said, 
"are too delicious to turn over," to 
do other than allow it to interpret 
itself. Its three most striking feat- 
ures, its episodes, allegories, and 
criticisms, are best seen by quota- 
tion, the only difficulty in such a 
course being, that, amid such fasci- 
nating and quotable material, it is 
impossible to resist the temptation 



160 Walter Savage Landor. 

of transcribing one more sentence, 
and you are thus irresistibly lured 
on. 

Take these scraps of the episode 
relating to Petrarch's visit to the 
parish church at Certaldo. " It be- 
ing now the Lord's Day, Messer 
Francesco thought it meet that he 
should rise early in the morning and 
bestir himself, to hear mass in the 
parish church at Certaldo. Where- 
upon he went on tiptoe, if so weighty 
a man could indeed go in such a 
fashion, and lifted softly the latch of 
Ser Giovanni's chamber door, that 
he might salute him ere he departed, 
and occasion no wonder at the step 
he was about to take. . . . He 
then went into the kitchen, where he 
found the girl Assunta, and men- 
tioned his resolution. . . . But 
Ser Francesco, with his natural po- 
liteness, would not allow her to equip 
his palfrey. ' This is not the work 



Landors Prose Writings. 161 

for maidens,' said he ; ' return to the 
house, good girl ! ' She lingered a 
moment, then went away; but, mis- 
trusting the dexterity of Ser Fran- 
cesco, she stopped and turned back 
again, and peeped through the half- 
closed door, and heard sundry sobs 
and wheezes around about the girth. 
Ser Francesco's wind ill seconded his 
intention ; and, although he had 
thrown the saddle valiantly and 
stoutly in its station, yet the girths 
brought him into extremity. She 
entered again, and dissembling the 
reason, asked him whether he would 
not take a small beaker of the sweet 
white wine before he set out, and 
offered to girdle the horse while his 
Reverence bitted and bridled him. 
Before any answer could be returned, 
she had begun. And having now 
satisfactorily executed her undertak- 
ing, she felt irresistible delight and 
glee at being able to do what Ser 



1 62 Walter Savage Landor. 

Francesco had failed in. He was 
scarcely more successful in his allot- 
ment of the labor — found unlooked- 
for intricacies and complications in 
the machinery, wondered that human 
wit could not simplify it, and de- 
clared that the animal never had 
exhibited such restiveness before. 
In fact, he had never experienced 
the same grooming." 

Although Landor expressed his 
own belief when he represented Pe- 
trarch as saying : " Allegory had few 
attractions for me, believing it to be 
the delight in general of idle, frivo- 
lous, inexcursive minds, in whose 
mansions there is neither hall nor 
portal to receive the loftier of the 
passions " ; yet for picturesqueness 
of expression and transparency of 
sentiment, the allegories, in the form 
of dreams, which Boccaccio and 
Petrarch relate to each other, are 
unsurpassed in the prose literature 



Landors Prose Writings. 163 

of imagination. Notice this fine 
consolatory description of Death in 
Petrarch's allegory of Sleep, Love, 
and Death. "At last, before the 
close of the altercation between Love 
and Sleep, the third Genius had ad- 
vanced, and stood before us. I can- 
not tell how I knew him, but I knew 
him to be the Genius of Death. 
Breathless as I was at beholding 
him, I soon became familiar with his 
features. First they seemed calm ; 
presently they grew contemplative ; 
and lastly beautiful : those of the 
Graces themselves are less regular, 
less harmonious, less composed. 
Love glanced at him unsteadily, 
with a countenance in which there 
was somewhat of anxiety, somewhat 
of disdain ; and cried : ' Go away ! 
go away ! nothing that thou touch- 
est, lives ! ' ' Say rather, child !' 
replied the advancing form, and ad- 
vancing grew loftier and statelier, — 



164 Walter Savage Landor. 

1 Say rather that nothing of beauti- 
ful or of glorious lives its own true 
life until my wing hath passed over 
it.' Love pouted, and rumpled and 
bent down with his forefinger the 
stiff, short feathers on his arrow- 
head ; but replied not. Although 
he frowned worse than ever, and at 
me, I dreaded him less and less, and 
scarcely looked toward him." 

Of criticisms and of general reflec- 
tions, most of them upon literary 
topics, the Pentameron has a de- 
lightful profusion. " No advice is 
less necessary to you," Landor says, 
through the thin disguise of Pe- 
trarch, " than the advice to express 
your meaning as clearly as you can. 
Where the purpose of glass is to be 
seen through, we do not want it 
tinted or wavy." Again, it is really 
Landor who says : " Enter into 
the mind and heart of your own 
creatures ; think of them long, en- 



Landor s Prose Writings, 165 

tirely, solely ; never of style, never 
of self, never of critics, cracked or 
sound. Like the miles of an open 
country, and of an ignorant popula- 
tion, when they are correctly meas- 
ured they become smaller. In the 
loftiest rooms and richest entabla- 
tures are suspended the most spider- 
webs ; and the quarry out of which 
palaces are erected is the nursery of 
nettle and bramble." It is to be 
regretted that Landor failed to per- 
ceive, however, that these spider- 
webs, these obscurities, arising from 
a lack of consideration for one's audi- 
ence, are just what rightly frighten 
away the majority of the reading 
public. 

In the direct line of literary criti- 
cism, Landor expends his energies 
upon Horace, Virgil, and Dante. 
When treating of the great Floren- 
tine, it were well if he had kept in 
mind his own words, which he puts 



1 66 Walter Savage Landor. 

into the mouth of Petrarch: "Sys- 
tems of poetry, of philosophy, of 
government, form and model us to 
their own proportions." This fact 
is precisely what Landor overlooks 
when he comes to examine Dante. 
He seems to be oblivious of the 
truth that the great poet, notwith- 
standing his unique, lofty, and om- 
nipresent personality, was an inte- 
gral part of his age and its highest 
expression, and that to appreciate 
him in any true degree the imagina- 
tion must travel back to the Middle 
Ages, to Dante's environment, 
through the doors of approach found 
in the history of popes and emperors, 
of the Italian cities and of scholas- 
ticism. Landor, on the contrary, 
studies Dante as an isolated phe- 
nomenon — as we have already had 
occasion to remark ; and partly for 
this reason, reaches the very debat- 
able conclusion that in the whole of 



Landors Prose Writings. 167 

the Inferno the only descriptions at 
all admirable are the episode of 
Francesca, so tenderly human as it 
is, though atmosphered by despair, 
and that of Ugolino. " Vigorous 
expressions there are many, but lost 
in their application to base objects ; 
and isolated thoughts in high relief, 
but with everything crumbling 
around them. Proportionately to 
the extent, there is a scantiness of 
poetry, if delight be the purpose or 
indication of it. Intensity shows 
everywhere the powerful master : 
and yet intensity is not invitation. 
A great poet may do everything but 
repel us. Established laws are pliant 
before him: nevertheless his office 
hath both its duties and its limits." 

It is impossible to close this con- 
verse with Petrarch and Boccaccio 
without transcribing the following 
thoughts, which, in their nobility, 
are not unlike Cicero's meditations 



1 68 Walter Savage Landor. 

upon friendship and old age. Pe- 
trarch says : " O Giovanni ! the heart 
that has once been bathed in love's 
pure fountain, retains the pulse of 
youth forever. Death can only take 
away the sorrowful from our affec- 
tions : the flower expands, the color- 
less film that enveloped it falls off 
and perishes." Boccaccio replies: 
" We may well believe it : and be- 
lieving it, let us cease to be dis- 
quieted for their absence who have 
but retired into another chamber. 
We are like those who have over- 
slept the hour: when we rejoin our 
friends, there is only the more joy- 
ance and congratulation. Would we 
break a precious vase, because it is 
as capable of containing the bitter 
as the sweet ? No : the very things 
which touch us the most sensibly are 
those which we should be the most 
reluctant to forget. The noble man- 
sion is most distinguished by the 



Landors Prose Writings, 169 

beautiful images it retains of beings 
past away ; and so is the noble 
mind. The damps of autumn sink 
into the leaves and prepare them for 
the necessity of their fall : and thus 
insensibly are we, as years close 
around us, detached from our te- 
nacity of life by the gentle pressure 
of recorded sorrows." 

The Pentameron was immediately 
preceded by the Pericles and As- 
pasia, a work which we have chosen 
to treat last, because we regard it as 
pre-eminently Landor's masterpiece. 
Though writing without books of 
reference, and with his usual deter- 
mination not to put into the mouth 
of his speakers any words which his- 
tory has attributed to them, Landor 
was yet able marvellously to repro- 
duce the serenely attractive atmos- 
phere of the Periclean age, and to 
fill his canvas with a succession 
of fair forms and characteristically 



1 70 Walter Savage Landor. 

Greek, and at the same time Lan- 
dorian reflections, such as no other 
modern has ever succeeded in doing. 
The volume is sui generis, and will 
probably long remain so ; moreover, 
unlike Landor's other compositions, 
no excisions could be made in it 
without weakening the general 
effect. Of course the antiquary 
might discover anachronisms and 
historic inaccuracies ; but then his 
interference here, as in Shakspeare's 
plays, is often an impertinence — an 
insistence upon the letter and a dis- 
regard of the spirit. 

Moreover, the ideas being cast in 
the form of letters, between Peri- 
cles and his wife and between her and 
her friends, the objections involved 
in Landor's conduct of the dia- 
logue are of none effect. It would 
be unnatural for letters, which pre- 
suppose decided intervals of time 
between their composition, and 



Landors Prose Writings. 1 7 1 

different moods in the writers, to 
maintain strict organic unity and 
sequence among themselves. That 
the replies are as spontaneous and 
irregular as in life, introducing any 
passing impressions or ideas of the 
correspondent and any incident or 
conversation in which he happened 
to take part, constitutes the central 
charm of this form of writing. The 
lack of an elaborate plot or plan, 
which in other compositions would 
be counted a weakness, is not so 
here. The result tends rather to 
produce a satisfying sense of beauti- 
ful and chaste reality. 

And as giving at least a faint idea 
of the finish and fascination of these 
letters, take the closing words of a 
missive, written by Aspasia to her 
young girl friend Cleone, descrip- 
tive of Alcibiades, then a youth : 
" He is as beautiful, playful, and un- 
certain as any half-tamed young 



172 Walter Savage Landor. 

tiger, feasted and caressed on the 
royal carpets of Persepolis ; not even 
Aspasia will ever quite subdue him." 
Then mark Cleone's reply : "I shall 
never more be in fear about you, my 
Aspasia. Frolicsome and giddy as 
you once appeared to me, at no time 
of your life could Alcibiades have in- 
terested your affections. You will be 
angry with me when I declare to you 
that I do not believe you will ever 
be in love. The renown and genius 
of Pericles won your imagination : 
his preference, his fondness, his con- 
stancy, hold, and will ever hold, 
your heart. The very beautiful 
rarely love at all. Those precious 
images are placed above the reach of 
the Passions : Time alone is per- 
mitted to efface them ; Time, the 
father of the gods, and even their 
consumer." Note the frank, femi- 
nine rejoinder of Aspasia : " Angry ! 
yes, indeed, very angry am I : but 
let me lay all my anger in the right 



Landor's Prose Writings. 1 73 

place. I was often jealous of your 
beauty, and have told you so a thou- 
sand times. Nobody for many years 
ever called me so beautiful as 
Cleone ; and when some people did 
begin to call me so, I could not be- 
lieve them. Few will allow the first 
to be first ; but the second and 
third are universal favorites. We 
are all insurgents against the des- 
potism of excellence." 

Again, take this scrap which intro- 
duces three of the greatest names of 
Greece. Aspasia writes to Cleone : 
" We were conversing on oratory and 
orators, when Anaxagoras said, look- 
ing at Pericles and smiling, ' They 
are described by Hesiod in two 
verses, which he applies to himself 
and the poets : 

Lies very like the truth we tell, 
And, when we wish it, truth as well.' 

Meton relaxed from his usual seri- 
ousness, but had no suspicion of the 



1 74 Walter Savage Landor. 

application, saying, ' Cleverly ap- 
plied indeed ! ' Pericles enjoyed the 
simplicity of Meton and the slyness 
of Anaxagoras, and said, ' Meton ! 
our friend Anaxagoras is so modest 
a man, that the least we can do for 
him is to acknowledge his claims as 
heir general to Hesiod. See them 
registered.' I have never observed 
the temper of Pericles either above 
or below the enjoyment of a joke ; 
he invites and retaliates, but never 
begins, lest he should appear to take 
a liberty. There are proud men of 
so much delicacy, that it almost 
conceals their pride, and perfectly 
excuses it." This last sentiment 
Landor no doubt felt would apply 
to himself as well. 

As an example of a different order 
of thought, let us transcribe the part- 
ing words of Pericles when on his 
death-bed : " 'Alcibiades ! I need not 
warn you against superstition : it 



Landor s Prose Writings. 175 

never was among your weaknesses. 
Do not wonder at these amulets: 
above all, do not order them to be 
removed. The kind old nurses, who 
have been faithfully watching over 
me day and night, are persuaded 
that these will save my life. Super- 
stition is rarely so kind-hearted ; 
whenever she is, unable as we are 
to reverence, let us at least respect 
her. After the good, patient crea- 
tures have found, as they must soon, 
all their traditional charms unavail- 
ing, they will surely grieve enough, 
and perhaps from some other motive 
than their fallibility in science. In- 
flict not, O Alcibiades, a fresh wound 
upon their grief, by throwing aside 
the tokens of their affection. In 
hours like these we are the most 
indifferent to opinion, and greatly 
the most sensible to kindness.' The 
statesman, the orator, the conqueror, 
the protector, had died away ; the 



176 Walter Savage Landor. 

philosopher, the humane man, yet 
was living . . . alas ! few mo- 
ments more." 

Some of Landor's most character- 
istic utterances on the great subjects 
of human thought are to be found 
among these letters. Thus, viewing 
history, not from the modern stand- 
point of Vico and his successors, who 
perceive within historic facts the 
unity of a progressively unfolding 
idea, but from the individualistic 
standpoint, Landor says : "The field 
of History should not be merely well 
tilled, but well peopled. None is 
delightful to me, or interesting, in 
which I find not as many illustrious 
names as have a right to enter it # 
We might as well in a drama place 
the actors behind the scenes, and 
listen to the dialogue there, as in a 
history push valiant men back, and 
protrude ourselves with husky dispu- 
tations." And again : " The busi- 



Landor s Prose Writings. 177 

ness of philosophy," says Landor, 
" is to examine and estimate all those 
things which come within the cogni- 
zance of the understanding. Specu- 
lations on any that lie beyond, are 
only pleasant dreams leaving the 
mind to the lassitude of disappoint- 
ment. They are easier than geom- 
etry and dialectics ; they are easier 
than the efforts of a well-regulated 
imagination in the structure of a 
poem." And it is obviously Landor 
who says: "All religions in which 
there is no craft nor cruelty are 
pleasing to the immortal gods ; be- 
cause all acknowledge their power, 
invoke their presence, exhibit our 
dependence, and exhort our grati- 
tude." 

And finally, as perfectly mirroring 
the Greek spirit, and as containing 
the essence of that Epicurean philos- 
ophy which would pray all men to 
enjoy the present, its sensations and 



178 Walter Savage Landor, 

ideas, and to count not upon the 
future, let us quote these graceful 
words of Cleone : " We have kept 
your birthday, Aspasia ! On these 
occasions I am reluctant to write 
anything. Politeness, I think, and 
humanity, should always check the 
precipitancy of congratulation. No- 
body is felicitated on losing. Even 
the loss of a bracelet or tiara is 
deemed no subject for merriment or 
alertness in our friends and followers. 
Surely then the marked and regis- 
tered loss of an irreparable year, the 
loss of a limb of life, ought to excite 
far other sensations." The implica- 
tions involved in these ideas are Hel- 
lenic to the core. Indulging our 
passions and emotions within rational 
bounds, and entertaining no vain 
regrets over the past and no foolish 
fears concerning the future, let us 
seek to extract from the fleeting 
moment all the honey, which, in the 



Landors Prose Writings, 1 79 

way of lawful sensations and ideas 
that moment can afford. Such an 
ideal is aesthetic rather than moral. 
It is the good, approached, if at all, 
through the gateway of the beauti- 
ful. It is the being " made perfect 
by the love of visible beauty " ; and 
its keynote is personal nobility rather 
than devotion to one's fellows. Such 
an ideal was Landor's ; and never 
has it been more alluringly conveyed 
than in his most perfect production, 
the Pericles and Aspasia. 



IV. 

LANDOR'S PLACE IN LITERA- 
TURE. 



ibi 



IV. 

LANDOR'S PLACE IN LITERATURE. 

After the somewhat exhaustive 
treatment of Landor as a man of 
letters, the determination of his place 
in literature must, in our estimation, 
have already been made, at least im- 
pliedly. Toward the close of his 
life, in a letter to Lord Brougham, 
Landor himself said : " I claim no 
place in the world of letters ; I am 
and will be alone, as long as I live, 
and after." That he has, neverthe- 
less, a place in the literary world is 
now undeniable, and that this place 
can be fixed only by a comparative 
estimate, is also true. Just as it is 
impossible, or at least unnatural, for 
183 



1 84 Walter Savage Landor. 

a man to exist alone, a cheerless soli- 
tary ; so is it likewise out of the 
question for an author to waive or 
forbid comparisons. Landor must 
therefore be tried by the same jury 
as his fellow-authors. And what is 
the verdict? 

That there are limitations to his 
genius it were folly to deny. The 
most damaging one consists in his 
lack of spiritual insight. Words- 
worth's intuitional poetry was always 
an enigma to Landor, who was wont 
to affirm, that, as the miner cannot 
delve far into the earth, so man 
cannot plunge into the abyss of 
speculative thought without directly 
reaching the void and formless, and 
cheating himself and others into 
the vain belief that nebulous rings, 
mere airy nothings, are habitable 
worlds. Landor might have been a 
student of Kant, considering the 
accuracy with which, in a literary 



Landor s Place in Literature. 185 

way, he conveys the impression that 
supersensible realities, if perchance 
they exist, are unknown. Landor 
had nothing of that Oriental insight 
which leads the mind to discover the 
one in the many, and a God in all 
the affairs of nature and man. " As 
one diffusive air, passing through 
the perforations of a flute, is distin- 
guished as the notes of a scale, so 
the nature of the Great Spirit is 
single, though its forms be manifold, 
arising from the consequences of 
acts." Does such a conception pos- 
sess meaning and truth ? Landor 
would have answered this question 
in the negative. 

Nevertheless, after making due 
allowance for limitations, it must be 
conceded that Landor has offered 
some permanent contributions to 
literature. His style alone must 
insure the preservation of much of 
his best work. Barring the fact of 



1 86 Walter Savage Landor. 

occasional obscurity, arising from 
undue condensation and a lack of 
tact and of sympathy for the reader, 
and also barring the fact that his 
sentences are at times too regular 
for exuberant life and reality, Lan- 
dor's style is flawless. It is charac- 
teristic and at the same time uni- 
versal. 

Passing to subject-matter, one can 
find no valid reason for supposing 
that Landor has not enduringly en- 
riched literature by the choicest of 
his idyls, of his scenes in dramatic 
poetry, of his imaginary conversa- 
tions, reflective and dramatic, and by 
his Pericles and Aspasia. Moreover, 
as the author of separate thoughts, 
which exhibit their extreme delicacy 
and beauty all the more clearly after 
they have been detached from their 
more or less prosaic surroundings, 
Landor has a special call upon our 
admiration. With the exception of 



Landors Place in Literature, 187 

Coleridge, English literature is al- 
most devoid of really fine pensfa- 
writers — like Pascal and Joubert, — 
who, though they stand related to 
the philosopher as gardeners do to 
the geologist, and though they are 
more concerned about truths than 
truth in its unity and at the same 
time its ramifying multiplicity, yet 
are stimulating and suggestive, often 
eminently so. And it is in this ca- 
pacity, as well as in that of idyllist, 
dramatic poet, writer of imaginary 
conversations and letters, that Lan- 
dor must long maintain a notable place 
in the minds of those choice spirits 
who love beautiful conceptions and 
noble thoughts beautifully and nobly 
expressed. 



APPENDIX. 



As an attempt to give color to our rough sketch 
of the Hellenics, those poetic gems from which 
beam the joy, buoyance, and serenity of the 
world's youth ; the following idyl, which is ani- 
mated, however inadequately, by a spirit and 
method of treatment similar to Landor's, is sub- 
joined. 



189 



THE SHADOW IN STONE. 

THE noon had passed, and Athens 
lay in light ; 
The deepening, azure-tinted sky drew 

low 
The vault of heaven ; the air was clear, 

so clear 
That shadows of yon ivy leaves hung 

there, 
Against the wall, more real than what 

they feigned ; 
The steeper slopes made cavernous 

shades ; and all, — 
Saving the olive trees, which looked 

afar 
Like hoary clouds stirred by a gentle 

breeze, — 
All was distinct, yet warm with drowsy 

life. 

191 



192 Appendix. 

And drowsy was the murmur of the 
bees 

In Myron's garden, and, within the hall, 

Lygeia, Myron's daughter, spake in 
tones 

That plashed the air in silvery ripples, 
spake 

To Rhoicos, ever and anon tapping 

His hand to emphasize her word. What 
was 

She saying ? Who can tell what swal- 
lows chirp 

In spring ! The lover's language is a 
tongue 

Known but to one who loves ; its ca- 
dences 

Are those of brook or breeze or ocean 
wave. 

So there they sat, hand linked in 

hand, and smiled 
And prattled at the simple bliss of it ; 
Till Rhoicos, catching sight of shades 

that lay 
Longer than four tall pillars whence 

they came, 



The Shadow in Stone, 193 

Declared 't was time to seek the breezy 

porch, — 
Lygeia having prayed of him to show 
The path toward Thebes, and thence 

must he depart, 
Before the shades were twice as long as 

now. 

As Rhoicos ceased, the shadows 

spread afar, 
Their sun had sunk into a darkening 

west : 
Since all the lamps in heaven must 

drearily burn 
For nights untold, before Lygeia's eyes 
Could glow again upon the eyes she 

loved : 
Rhoicos must leave the flowers and pur- 
pling grape 
Of vine-clad Attica, must leave the light 
From sun-illumined locks and sky-lit 

eyes. 
He must away, for duty urged him 

home 

To a lone mother, watching, with tired 

gaze, 
13 



1 94 Appendix, 

For him who now should be husband 

and son 
Together : nor was it permitted him 
To journey back to rugged Attica, 
When wintry blasts were raging o'er the 

land, 
For it was whispered in the agora 
That Athens meant to humble haughty 

Thebes ; 
And even then the Athenian archons 

looked, 
With eyes askance, upon a Theban 

youth. 
And Myron longed to keep his daugh- 
ter home, 
One winter more, to gladden his old 

eyes ; 
So he declared Lygeia was too young 
To see the nuptial torch borne blazing 

forth, 
And Rhoicos must await till vernal 

flowers 
Strew bright the way from Athens forth 

to Thebes. 
Hence were they sorrowful. 



The Shadow in Stone, 195 

And as they stepped 

Upon the porch, whose frieze and col- 
umns tall 

Were graved by Myron's skilful hand ; 
Rhoicos, 

That he might turn their speech in 
smoother ways, 

Exclaimed, — one arm against a marble 
shaft, 

The other stretched in front of him : 
"'Tis well 

For thee to bide here where the far-off 
sea 

Flows glimmering toward the shore, and 
as thou near'st 

Yon sun-bathed cliff, to catch the 
glancing smile 

Of waves, that dash the sea-weed, ochry- 
hued, 

Into the hollowed rocks. 'T were sweet 
to tread 

Such paths with thee as guide. Bright 
Thebes can boast 

Naught fairer than yon glimpse of wave- 
bound wharves, 



196 Appendix. 

Where husbandmen have garnered dues 

of oil 
And fragrant wine. Yea, harvest-laden 

fields 
And softly swaying cypresses are 

touched 
With mellow light, and all is passing 

fair. 
The sky is swept of every cloud, save 

one, 
That floats serene in yon vast azure 

deep. 
A foolish cloud ! the flaming chariot 

wheel 
Of Helios will crush into thin air 
The mist that goes unguarded and alone. 
Lygeia, thou art such a virgin cloud ! 
And would an oracle might straight 

declare, 
No gorgeous vapor, silver-lined, will 

rise 
To seek this white-robed cloud, when 

I have gone 
The dusky way from Athens forth to 

Thebes ! 



The Shadow in Stone. 197 

Lygeia, vow to me, no darkling cloud, 
Though silver-tipped, 'twixt us shall 

ever lower." 
(For Rhoicos thought of the Athenian 

youth, 
With their smooth-rolling words and 

glances soft.) 

To this fond talk of clouds, Lygeia 

had, 
Like other maids, paid but a grudging 

heed ; 
For she would draw his gaze down from 

the sky, 
Nor would she have her lover find a sun 
More lucent than her glowing eyes, a 

cloud 
So sweetly shading as their down-turned 

lids: 
So she cried, laughing : " Thou thyself 

art changed 
Into a sombre cloud with a silver rim ! " 

He turned, and saw that she had 
edged with chalk 



198 Appendix. 

The shadow of his form — with crum- 
bling chalk 

That gleamed against the dull, time- 
weathered wall. 

" Now, Rhoicos, what say'st thou of 
clouds with rims 

Of silver ? Shall I not admire this shade, 

That mimics thee, as torches do the sun ? 

For, gazing at this shadow of thyself, 

I can compare my stature with thine 
own, 

Can see how passing tall and brave thou 
art — 

Nor was thy shadow quite so tall as 
thou ! 

But look ! thine outline stands below 
the frieze 

Whereon Athene Parthenos contends 

For sunny Attica 'gainst dreaded lord 

Of wind-lashed wastes, Poseidon ; o'er 
thine head 

Athene, my protecting goddess, holds 

An olive branch with spiky leaves, and 
smiles 

Upon thee." 



The Shadow in Stone. 199 

At these sallies Rhoicos laughed, 
And said : " Thou should'st have made 

my shadow beam 
Upon the goddess ; for 't was on her day 
Of choric dance and festival, I first 
Beheld thy face. 

I had gone by that age 
When boys choose rather to play games 

with boys 
Than tame their sport to girlish tastes ; 

and soon 
My dreams gave vision of fair maids, 

their locks 
Streaming or garlanded with hyacinth 
And myrtle intertwined, who blithely 

tripped 
With me to groves where checkered 

shadows play ; 
When, one clear morn, while Eos yet 

upshot 
Her burnished arrows 'gainst the fleet- 
ing gloom, 
We rose in haste, — I vexed for broken 

dreams 



200 Appendix, 

Of tripping maids, — since we must reach 

that day 
The pillared heights of the Acropolis ; 
For on the morrow Athens held in 

pomp 
Her choric dance and sacred festival 
In reverence of Athene* Parthenos. 
'T was on that morrow I beheld you 

first. 
Amongst the white-robed maids who 

celebrate 
The glistering goddess of the wide- 
arched brow, 
I saw one form that sent me to my 

dreams, — 
I thought it was Athene in disguise : 
And all the journey home that face 

would start 
From every wayside bush, and gaze at 

me, 
And set me longing for Athenian streets 
And sweet processions of untroubled 

maids." 
And thus the lovers talked, as lovers do, 
Of nothing save themselves. 



The Shadow in Stone, 201 

But swift the fields 
Grew golden-hued. The reapers shade 

their eyes 
And westward peer : they think of wife 

and child, 
And gladsome leisure at the eventide. 
Such thoughts were not for Rhoicos : 

he must leave 
Lygeia ; and the laughter that outgushed 
From rosy lips, he might not hear for 

days 
Untold. Hence, plaintive were their 

parting words. 

And as he wound his way above the 

slope, 
He looked back long and wistfully ; 

and oft 
His helmet shimmered in the glancing 

rays : 
Blurred was Lygeia's sight, she turned, 

she cried 
To Pallas, who upon the frieze upheld 
Her olive branch above the outlined 

form 



202 Appendix, 

Of Rhoicos : " O thou virgin Deity, 
May I not see my lover's form till suns 
Unnumbered flaunt their streamers in 

the west ? 
Is this fond outline of his vanished 

shade 
The only semblance of his shape for me 
To gaze upon, and gazing, dream of 

him ? " 

Myron, within the hall, was polishing 
A statue of that goddess who arose 
Refulgent from the silvery surge, and 

smiles 
On lovers, Aphrodite, golden-haired ; 
And when he heard Lygeia's prayer, he 

came, — 
His beard by many winters frosted 

white, — 
And smilingly he spake : " Child, I o'er- 

heard 
Thy words to Rhoicos, when, in play, 

thou saidst, 
That he was changed into a cloud with 

rim 



The Shadow in Stone, 203 

Of silver, and, within two full-orbed 

moons, 
Will turn this silver lining toward thine 

eyes." 
At these strange words his daughter 

marvelled much. 

Far other words came to Lygeia's ear 
Full soon — dread words that set her 

pondering, 
Until her limbs grew tremulous with 

cold, 
And stifling fear clutched at Lygeia's 

soul : 
'T was rumored in the streets that Ath- 
ens meant 
To war with Thebes, and ever and anon, 
A citizen, with breathless speech and 

looks 
Inquiring, hasted to the agora, 
To learn the latest word. Lygeia feared 
For Rhoicos, yet she tried to choke her 

fear, 
And tended Myron's wants, as was her 

way. 



204 Appendix. 

And then to rest her after daily 
cares, 

When night folded the land in slumber- 
ous shade, 

She would steal out to their cool west- 
ern porch, 

And watch Selene ride, fulgent or 
veiled, 

Through skies paven with ponderous 
clouds, through skies 

Whose paths were lightest air ; then 
oft her dreams 

Would turn to that glad day, when, hand 
in hand, 

Rhoicos and she might journey forth to 
Thebes ; 

And nuptial hymns resound and torches 
flare ; 

When, suddenly, a blighting fear would 
chill 

Lygeia's soul, and she would turn, and 
scan, 

With troubled eyes, the outlined form of 
him 

She longed for. 



The Shadow in Stone, 205 

And oft Myron, musingly, 
Would mark this self-same outline, then 

would go 
Into his workshop, whence arose the din 
Of splintering chisel and of rasping file. 
In this slow, weary wise, the days 

dragged on. 



The leaves have fallen on the Attic 

slopes ; 
And after battle's heated rush, how soft 
To wounded warrior is their kindly 

couch. 
Right valiantly have ten score Theban 

youths 
Withstood, from dawn to eventide, the 

darts 
Dealt by Athenian hands ; but now the 

bloom 
Of Theban chivalry is faded, gone. 
The moonbeams fall on faces that a day 
Before had smiled farewell to loving 

maids 
And tearful mothers, faces that can smile 



206 Appendix, 

No more, but lie all bathed in cold 

moonlight, 
Or sunk in Stygian shadow, when a 

cloud, 
Scurrying athwart the sky, obscures the 

moon. 
The wind is sobbing, sobbing, in the 

trees ; 
And ever and anon, a faded leaf 
Is blown upon a burnished shield, and 

dims 
Its brightness. 

Glorious little Theban band ! 

Like heroes have ye fought against foul 
odds, 

Nor was there one poor, craven soul 
that turned 

His back upon the foe. By your proud 
names, 

Will Theban fathers call their lithe- 
limbed sons ; 

And mothers, taking on their laps their 
boys, 

Will tell the story of your fortitude, 



The Shadow in Stone, 207 

Nor will they fail to speak of him who 

stood, 
Staunch leader of the ranks, Rhoicos 

the brave. 



With lordly waving plume and brow 

elate, 
The Athenians enter now their city walls; 
And all the streets are clamorous with 

acclaim. 
The elder warriors throw their armor off, 
Glad to reach home once more ; the 

younger men, 
Each clad in greaves and breastplate, 

hasten forth 
To seek the timid smiles of those they 

love. 
And as the maidens catch their heroes' 

tread, 
Each heart beats quick, and blushes 

come and go. 

Alone, disconsolate, Lygeia lay 
Upon her couch ; and endlessly one wail 



208 Appendix. 

Kept throbbing, throbbing through her 

soul, — no more 
To see him whom she loved, no more, 

no more ! 
Not even might she hanghis dented shield 
Upon the wall, and scan its rusting face. 

And as Lygeia lay there desolate, 
Old Myron called her to the western 

porch, 
Whereon the moonbeams fell resplen- 

dently, 
And spake in mournful yet triumphant 

tone : 
" Behold, my child, what I in jest had 

wrought ! " 

There, motionless, she stood, fixed was 

her gaze 
Upon a statue, silver-sheened and large, 
Of purest Parian stone, — statue of him 
She loved, — one arm against a marble 

shaft, 
The other stretched in front of him, the 

head 



The Shadow in Stone. 209 

Crowned with a wreath of glinting olive 
leaves, 

Which, that same night, Myron had cut 
and twined. 

'T was Rhoicos' self done to the finger- 
tips : 

And yet Apollo, with his sun-bright 
locks 

Rippling in air, shone not more glorious. 

So did the goddess hear Lygeia's 

prayer : 
Through weary, weary years her soul 

might hold 
Long converse with his beauteous shape; 

and then, 
When tears would flow, her eyes would 

catch a glimpse 
Of that fair wreath of fading olive leaves ; 
And pride and peace would fill Lygeia's 

soul. 

E. W. E., Jr. 



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